This post is part of my personal challenge to bake my way through all the challenges of the Great British Bake Off. The challenge below is the showstopper challenge for week four (dessert week) of series three: a four-layer meringue stack.

Imagine a dessert with all the flavours of British summer in one huge – crazily huge – stack of sweet meringue and sharp bright fruit that burst in the mouth and the soothing lap of cream and the scent of violets just at the back of it. So – not a real British summer but the one we dream of in winter, when the rain has pounded down thick and grey for the fifth day running, when the wind whistles its way down your collar, when the ice is slick on the pavement. Days like today and tomorrow and yesterday. So instead we’ll think of summers in the park, summers by the beach, sweet red fruit heavy on the bush, juicy in the mouth. And stickiness – prickle of sweat, sunscreen, the streak of melted ice cream running down the inside of your wrist. We imagine such days as these: wine on the balcony, smell of chlorine at the lido, cut grass, roses nodding. Well, who wouldn’t dream of it?
In this era of fervently seasonal eating it’s probably somewhat outré to point out that strictly speaking you do not have to save this for summer. If you want to indulge in mouthfuls of bright, sharp fruit and curd, mallow-bellied meringue and cream whipped to blowsy perfection in the dark heart of winter, in these difficult, no-longer-festive days, you can acquire raspberries and redcurrants at your local supermarket even now. Yes, they may come from Spain and Morocco and yes, I wouldn’t make this a daily indulgence, as hard as it is (I love raspberries) – the environmental, cultural and economic costs of permanent global summertime are well-documented. But in the cold days, the hard days, our spirits need as much nourishment as our bodies, and our eyes and taste buds are as deserving of stimulation and novelty as our eyes. If you want to go for it, I think it’s okay. I think people are very good at punishing themselves and sometimes a commitment to seasonal eating and supporting small producers can become slightly punitive (“how dare you buy sourdough from a supermarket, don’t you know it’s a fraud and you should support your local organic bakery!?” – not that I have one); we should combine awareness and a global outlook with kindness and forgiveness towards ourselves and others, and this applies to food too.

I have included the recipes I used to make the lemon and passion fruit curds as well as directions for the meringue stacks, blueberry-violet sauce and assembly. I love fruit curds – their sharp, bright flavour; their delicate, almost translucent creaminess; their vivid colours – and I love making them, slowly, stirring the mixture in a makeshift double boiler while drifting away into thought or catching up on the radio. However, it does add to the time of the enterprise, of course, and if you don’t share my enjoyment of making curds (which makes all the wiping up of sticky streaks worth it), do buy it. Lemon curd is two-a-penny in any supermarket, and good reputable preserve-makers such as Tiptree make passion fruit curd.
The full recipes are below the jump. It looks long and yes, it is a multi-stage assembly process, but each individual bit is not so very hard, and, if you choose to buy your curds, should actually come together fairly easily after baking.
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