Strawberry Cream Jelly ストロベリ クリーム ジェリー

My photos don't do justice to these berries but when you have strawberries this beautiful, it is almost a sacrilege to cook or bake with them - unless you have loads of them sitting around. Plenty of these, I have not. I bought my 2 precious punnets in Japan 2 days ago for a fraction of the price I would need to pay for similar superior grades here in Singapore. Each perfect heart-shaped fruit beckons with its jewel-like ruby red colour. These fruits are totally in a league of their own - far from the sickly, dull coloured and odd-shaped versions we get at our neighbourhood supermarkets. The only place one can find beautiful strawberries here in Singapore would be at the Japanese supermarkets which air-lift these precious fruits every year and sell them at a hefty price.
I have always associated the 'sweet bubble gum' strawberry flavour you get in strawberry candies, milk, juice etc with 'fake' articifical flavourings created by food chemists in the lab - that is until today, when I tasted these wonderful Japanese strawberries that I realised that such sweet candy like flavour does exist in the real strawberry fruit.

It is hard not to yield to the temptation to make something with these fruits. Hence in order to stay true to the original flavour of the strawberry fuits, I decided to make a cold dessert and aside from good champagne, I guess the next best pairing for strawberries would be cream. In Japan, where you find strawberries, you would almost always find tubes of condensed milk placed beside them. Hence, I decided to make a soft pudding like Strawberry Cream Jelly.



I had used a little more gelatine because I had wanted to get a firmer pudding so that it would demould and photograph better, otherwise, the gelatine quantity can be reduced (1gram less) to get more smoother and creamy texture. How was the taste? Delicious with a capital 'D' - and I humbly attribute the beautiful taste to the strawberries - I cannot take any credit for these.



Recipe

Pink Layer
Strawberry Puree         100g
Sugar                           25g
Lemon Juice                 1 tsp
Gelatine powder           3.5g (for more creamy texture, use 2.5g)
Warm Water                1 tbsp
Milk                             80ml

White Layer
Milk                              200ml
Condensed Milk            2 tbsp
Sugar                            1 tbsp
Gelatine powder            6g (for more creamy texture, use 5g)
Hot water                      2 tbsp
Vanilla extract                1/2 tsp

Method
Pink Layer
1.  Mix gelatine with hot water until transparent. Set aside.
2. Add strawberry puree,sugar, lemon juice into a saucepan. Heat to dissolve sugar. Add milk and heat into just before boiling.
3. Add (1)
4. Pour into mold and set until firm.

White Layer
1. Mix gelatine with hot water until transparent. Set aside.
2. Add milk, condensed milk and sugar into a saucepan. Heat to dissolve sugar. Add vanilla extract. Heat until just before boiling.
3. Add (1)
4. Cool mixture down to 40C before pouring over set pink layer.