How to make the perfect raspberry jelly

Wibble wobble, wibble wobble, party on a plate - nothing like jelly to make people smile, and not much to touch to make the most of fruit gluts summer, especially when it's already halfway done hot sticky jam. Beautiful to behold and light as a feather to eat; a jewel-shaped jelly is sure to be the perfect end to a summer party, especially since it begs to be prepared well in advance, leaving you with nothing to do but unmold it in triumph and to soak up the applause. Yet few of us realize how easy it is to dodge cubes. Try; I promise you that nothing you do this year will bring you more joy.

After trying a recipe, from Rory O'Connell's book, Master It, where the fruit is suspended in a contrasting jelly (mint in her case, though Sally Clarke has a 30-ingredient version where they're put in a mixture of their own juice and apple juice), I decide that I would prefer the jelly itself to be flavored with raspberry. But I'll also add whole fruits before they set to provide a sexy textural contrast, and there are several different approaches to achieving this. In his book Bryn's Kitchen, chef Bryn Williams mixes raspberries with sugar and water, puts them over a pot of hot water and lets them sit for an hour until they have dropped much of their juice, yielding a beautifully clear, emphatically flavored result. But, eating the leftover fruit afterwards, it was clear to me that it had more to give. Jane Grigson's Fruit Book employs a similar, but slightly more violent tactic, in that she heats the water throughout, noting that by the end of the process the fruit should be reduced to a "grey-red debris "unappetizing, which seems more satisfying. home cooks who want to get the most out of their ingredients.

Others are even more brutal with fruit - both Elisabeth Ayrton, who bases her recipe in English Provincial Cooking on a Manuscript of Cheshire of 1600, and