Easter Dessert

To finish off our lovely meal at Easter Sunday, I'd picked out one from my recipe card collection (which is still growing a lot faster than I can try things out).

I had to make some adjustments of course - I opted for vege-gel, rather than gelatin and I had to make two alcohol free ones. The recipe card was for 4 portions, I re-calculated for 11, and ended up with spare jelly, which Lundulph and I gobbled up a few days later.

Ingredients

Alcoholic version for 9
900 ml sweet rose wine
225 g golden caster sugar
2 sachets vege-gel 2 pinches of dried lavender
450 g raspberries

Non-alcoholic version for 2
200 ml pink soft drink
40 g golden caster sugar
small pinch dried lavender
100 g raspberries
half a sachet vege-gel

To serve
whipping cream
icing sugar, 1 tbsp/dl cream

Method

1. Place the rose wine and the sugar in a saucepan and heat up gently to dissolve the sugar, but not to boil.
2. Distribute the raspberries into serving glasses, 50 g per person.
3. Turn the heat up a little and stir the vege-gel powder into the wine/sugar mixture and just bring to the boil, then remove from the hob and quickly distribute over the raspberries to just about cover them, but use a strainer to catch the bits of dried lavender.
4. Allow to cool completely, then cover and chill.
5. Whip the cream with the icing sugar, then pipe it over the jellies and serve.

The non-alcoholic version is exactly the same, I've just reduced the amount of sugar as the soft drink tends to be fairly sweet to begin with. Also to keep in mind, Vege-gel sets very quickly after it's been heated up, so everything must be ready as you'll have to work fast.

The whipping cream was my Mum's suggestion, I just whipped it and put on the table for people to add as much as they wanted, rather than fiddle with piping. The rose jelly on its own had quite an odd after taste and I think this is a combination of not using a sweet rose and the lavender. But with the raspberries it was quite different and with the whipped cream, even better.