Eton Mess is one of those puddings that isn't really a recipe at all — it's more of an excuse. An excuse to break up some meringue, whip some cream, and pile it all on top of whatever strawberries happen to be good that week. Which, if you ask me, makes it the perfect thing to make a mess of with gelato instead.
We use strawberries from Forde Abbey for our Strawberry gelato — the same pick-your-own gardens where, ten years ago, our four children spent an entire summer's day picking raspberries for what turned out to be our very first sorbet. They complained the whole way through it, if I'm honest. Raspberries are not an easy fruit to pick. But that's really where all of this started: good fruit, not much done to it, and it tasting extraordinary as a result.
Why gelato works even better than ice cream here
Eton Mess is traditionally made with whipped cream and sometimes a scoop of vanilla ice cream folded through. We think Strawberry gelato does the job better, because it's already carrying all that strawberry flavour rather than relying on the fruit alone to do the work. Ours has less fat and much less air than a standard ice cream, so it holds its own against the meringue and cream instead of disappearing under them.
It's the same thing I realised making that very first raspberry sorbet in our kitchen — really good ingredients, treated simply, give you a really good result. We've stuck to that ever since, even when it would have been cheaper not to.
How we put it together
Nothing about this needs a method, really. It's assembly, and it's meant to look a bit chaotic.
- Break shop-bought or homemade meringue into rough, uneven pieces — the unevenness is the point
- Whip double cream to soft peaks, not stiff — you want it collapsing slightly into everything else
- Hull and roughly chop fresh strawberries, and if you can get proper ripe ones with a bit of give, all the better
- Make a quick strawberry coulis — just blitz a handful of strawberries with a little sugar and lemon juice, then push it through a sieve if you want it smooth. This is the bit Annie always adds, and it's what pulls the whole glass together
- Add a scoop or two of Baboo Strawberry gelato, slightly softened
- Layer it all into a glass in no particular order — cream, gelato, strawberries, meringue, a good drizzle of the coulis, repeat — and finish with a strawberry or two and a last thread of coulis on top
Serve it in something you can see through, if you can. Half the joy of an Eton Mess is watching the layers, and that coulis, collapse into each other as you eat it.
A pudding worth doing properly
We get asked sometimes why we don't cut corners on the fruit side of things — buy in a cheaper purée, use less of it, that sort of thing. We never have, and we're not about to start. Every batch of Strawberry gelato still uses real strawberries, puréed by us, with nothing artificial doing the flavour's job for it. It costs us more. It's also the only way we know how to make it taste like an actual strawberry.
If you make this one, we'd genuinely love to see it — tag us, or come and tell us about it next time you're at one of our kiosks. We're always happy to talk puddings.
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Coming up next: our take on a proper birthday cake, using raspberry sorbet, cream and passion fruit — the one nobody ever leaves leftovers of.