Medium
By Denis Cotter
Published 1999
I must explain why I use the word ‘organic’ in this recipe. The strawberries we were getting were so delicious, so intensely flavoured, perfectly ripe and chaotically shaped that we had to serve them simply and in abundance. It would have been a crime to trick them out in a clever recipe, and I wanted to emphasize that it was the strawberries themselves that were the stars of the dish. If you do this dish with thinly flavoured, water-puffed strawberries, you will need to do a song and dance routine as well to get a smile from your guests. You could, of course serve the strawberries on a slice of an ordinary large pavlova, but these individual ones are no harder to make.
Whip the cream until it is stiff enough to stand up on its own. Take about 100g of the strawberries, puree them, sieve them and add a little icing sugar to this sauce. Make sure the rest of the strawberries are at room temperature, take their little green hats off and chop any over-sized monsters in half. If you doubt their sweetness, sprinkle a little sugar over them up to half an hour before you serve them.
Place a pavlova in the centre of each plate with a 1-2cm layer of whipped cream on top, then place as many strawberries on top and around the pavlova as is physically possible and edible. Pour a stream of the strawberry sauce around and over each pavlova too.
© 1999 All rights reserved. Published by Cork University Press.