If you are eating a dessert your life is generally going okay. There are many desserts I’ve loved over the years. One I miss is Gino Ginelli’s tutti fruitti ice cream. For a while in the late 1980s this had ousted the Viennetta as the Sunday lunchtime dessert of choice for my family. I have attempted to recreate this dessert.

As I remember it, there were fat raisins and glace fruit pieces in a pale colour ice cream. It tasted of more than vanilla. I chose some Whitworths flame raisins, some Sussex Wholefoods mixed glace fruit and some Sainsbury’s raspberry and peach Melba ice cream.

The bowl I chose to eat this experiment in is very important, it’s the same J.&G. Meakin poppy pattern bowl as the one I’d have eaten it from in the late 1980s. There are loads of these on ebay.

I have an eclectic mix of kitchen stuff. As well as retro stuff mainly from my grandparents I also have cute bat kitchen scissors.

I added 30 grams of mixed glace fruit and 10 flame raisins to my bowl.

I then paused for a moment to consider the lovely appearance of Sainsbury’s raspberry and peach melba ice cream. I invented the word oreink to capture something which is pink, red and orange.

I added about 66 grams of ice cream (a bit more than the per scoop serving size of 54 grams written on the tub).

I then mixed the glace fruits, raisins and ice cream.

The result? Did I have a Proustian moment? Is now the time to come clean and admit I haven’t read Proust but have had a lovely six volume set of his In Search of Lost Time in my ebay basket for ages?

I had achieved a good dessert but I wasn’t back in 1987. I’d used way too much mixed fruit, causing an enjoyable Christmassy feel, and the peach flavour, while pleasant, was not in keeping with the original dessert.

Will I try this again? I’ve got 470 grams of mixed glace fruit to do something with. Or will I turn my attentions to the now discontinued Wimpy Knickerbocker Glory? I last had one in Swanage in September 2019. I’ve had great modern desserts too, most notably the chocolate nemesis at Branca, the lemon meringue cheesecake from Cheesecake Factory and the strawberry Napoleon on an NCL cruise ship.