Strawberries with Cobnuts & Fennel

This strawberry and cobnuts recipe from Adam Stokes includes a sweet and smooth white chocolate parfait. The sauce is made from infusing strawberries with mint, champagne and vanilla before hanging in muslin cloth to extract a crystal clear strawberry 'soup'.

To make the strawberry soup; mix the strawberries with the zest and juice of the lime and lemon.

Split the vanilla pod, add this to the strawberries along with the mint, sugar, water and the champagne. Mix this well, massaging the strawberries gently so that they break down slightly. Cover the bowl, leave to infuse for 24 hours at room temperature.

The next day, transfer the mixture into a muslin cloth, hang the muslin over a bowl and squeeze to release a clear strawberry juice. When all the juice has been released, put the clear juice in the fridge to chill, you can discard the contents of the muslin.

For the parfait; gently melt the white chocolate in a bain-marie. You can do this by placing a pan of water on a medium heat, put a heat proof bowl over the water, making sure the bottom does not touch the water. Add the chocolate to the bowl and stir gently until melted.

Add the whole egg, the yolks, the sugar and vanilla seeds into a mixer. Whisk until you’ve made a pale, thick sabayon.

Whip the double cream until it starts to form medium peaks, gently fold in the sabayon followed by the melted chocolate. Mix it together very gently as you don’t want to remove any of the air.

Pour into a tray lined with silicon paper, place in the freezer to set. You can also put a chopping board in the freezer at this time; although this is optional, it will help keep your parfait cold when you cut it later.

Once the parfait has set, place on a cold chopping board and cut into small pieces.

Hull the remaining strawberries and arrange them neatly in the bottom of 4 bowls. Pour some of the chilled strawberry soup over them, add the cobnuts, white chocolate parfait cubes and sprinkle the herbs over the top.