NEXT YEAR, I'll know better. Almost all of our strawberry crop has gone to feeding the local blackbirds, writes Tom Doorley.
And when I say local, I mean every blackbird within about three miles. Hordes of them have feasted on the fruits of the strawberry plants which I imported, at some expense, from Marshall's of Cambridgeshire, a stunning variety called Marshmello.
The few that escaped were the best strawberries I've ever tasted and the stalks came out very easily. The 2009 crop will be fully protected around the clock. As a result of this loss, I've been trying to enhance the flavour of the usual sort that you buy on the side of the road (which seem to have been better than usual - perhaps because of the dry weather).
One trick I thought of trying was to make rose-petal cream, so I dug out Joyce Molyneux's The Carved Angel Cookery Book. Molyneux ran this famous Dartmouth restaurant, which was more recently in the hands of John Burton Race.
My version of the Molyneux rose-petal cream was a disaster. It involves putting rose petals and cream in a blender and whizzing the two together. I ended up with rose-petal butter and a lot of beautifully coloured whey.
On the second attempt, I improvised. A generous handful of rose petals, cleared of any animal life, went into the blender with a dessertspoon of caster sugar, a squeeze of lemon juice and a few teaspoons of water. This produced an intensely fragrant and vaguely pink purée which I folded in to thickly whipped cream. After three hours in the fridge it was dished up with fresh strawberries and was utterly delicious.
The trick here is to choose your roses carefully. There's no point in using modern hybrid teas because they have little or no scent and the petals are too fleshy. You need proper old-fashioned roses or the new English roses from David Austin, which are bred to mimic the scent and form of the old varieties but with longer flowering times.
We have had varietal wines, so why not varietal rose-petal cream? Well, the combination I used was Zephyrine Drouhin and Fantin Latour. I'm tempted to try Rambling Rector but its intense perfume smells more of hyacinths than roses. It could be interesting . . .
My daughter turned the rose-petal butter into icing for a Victoria sponge and filled it with what was left of the rose cream. Very sweet, but empty calories have rarely tasted so good.