Summer fruit plate with lime, mint and vanilla syrup
Perfect with whatever fruit you fancy
10 mins plus chilling
Super easy
serves 8
About the recipe
The key to a good fruit salad is lovely ripe, sweet fruit. Pick up whatever looks beautiful and ripe – anything hard will be sour and you don’t want that! This recipe works well with pretty much whatever’s in season.
Ingredients
For the syrup
100g golden caster sugar
a small bunch of fresh mint, leaves picked, stalks reserved
zest and juice of 2 limes
1 vanilla pod, scored lengthways, seeds scraped out, pod reserved
1 punnet of ripe strawberries
2 handfuls of cherries
2 punnets of blackberries
1 small punnet of redcurrants
2 ripe peaches
4 apricots
1 small cantaloupe melon
optional: natural yoghurt, to serve
Method
This seasonal fruit salad recipe is all about the juicy fruit and lovely, thick vanilla syrup
- Pick the mint leaves and reserve the stalks. Score the vanilla pod lengthways and scrape out the seeds, reserving the pod.
- Put the sugar and mint stalks in a small saucepan with 200ml water and bring to the boil. Turn the heat off, then add the zest and juice of the limes, and the vanilla pod and seeds. Mix it all together and place to one side to cool down. You want a lovely thick syrup, but remember it will thicken as it cools.
- Wash the fruit gently in cold water and drain in a colander. Halve and stone the cherries and chop any larger berries in half, then spread them out on a wide, flat dish. Halve and stone the peaches and apricots, then cut them into nice wedges and put with the berries.
- Halve the melon, scoop out the seeds and chuck them away. With the same spoon, over the dish of fruit, scoop out curls of melon until you reach the green skin. Pour half of the syrup over the fruit, cover and chill for a while, so it soaks up all that lovely flavour.
- To serve, pick out the mint stalks, then sprinkle over the mint leaves. Serve with dollops of natural yoghurt if you like, and a little jug of your leftover syrup for drizzling over.
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