I’m always hearing – admittedly mainly from PRs – about some hotshot mixologist who has reinvented the cocktail as we know it, but who on closer inspection has just changed their brand of vodka or the colour of the bar top or something. But walking into Pearl restaurant in London, you sense Gustavo Bertolucci might be on to something. At a stroke he has solved that age-old dilemma when the waiter clears away your main course – do you want pudding or just more alcohol?

Teaming up with head pastry chef Ben Knell, he’s created the first dessert cocktail menu I’ve come across, and what a fun way to end a meal it is, too. Rhubarb custard crumble, lemon meringue pie, raspberry sherry trifle – all the familiar tastes of your childhood, only with a decidedly adult kick.

The menu pairs Knell’s love of classic puddings with Bertolucci’s knowledge of the spirit world. “Martini drinkers wouldn’t approve – like mojito drinkers, they think there’s only one cocktail in the world,” says Bertolucci, “but a lot of people, especially young ladies, love it. They open the menu and go, ‘Ooooh, what’s that?’” He says proper dessert sales haven’t been affected, and that plenty of people – yes, tables of men, too – will have the dessert cocktails at the bar at the start of an evening. “The challenge is not to make them too sweet,” he adds.

Coming up with the drinks wasn’t nearly as straightforward as Knell had imagined. “For example, I definitely wanted to do a sticky toffee pudding,” he says, “but a pudding like that is all in the texture, and if you re-create it in a cocktail it just becomes a sickly mess. It just tastes of sugar.” Summer pudding, that unctuous blend of berries in a bread casing, was another one that fell flat. “The idea is that you taste a liquid form of the pudding, so if you close your eyes you know what it is.” You don’t need me to tell you how experiments with liquid bread turned out.

What they’ve ended up with is a list of five drinks, each presented with the decorative flourish of a Michelin-starred pudding. The Bramley apple pie comes with a neat disc of sweet pastry and slice of apple sitting on top of a shaken glass of bison grass vodka, apple schnapps, apple purée and cinnamon syrup. “The first idea was to make a pie crust and bake it on the glass, but that clearly wasn’t going to work, so we made the discs separately,” says Knell. “Then we tried making the apple purée on the stove top, but in the end what worked best was to score the apple and bake it in the oven until it exploded, and then pass that through a sieve. There was a lot of trial and error in all the drinks.”

For the raspberry sherry trifle, they used a bit of Hestonish wizardry to create sherry “bombs” of mascarpone, Tio Pepe and vanilla encased in a thin film of vegetarian jelly which explode in your mouth as you drink the blend of fresh raspberry, vodka and chambord.

Strawberries and cream is presented as blood red ice cubes in a tall glass, with a jug of zero per cent fat cream (laced, of course, with vanilla and strawberry liqueur) on the side. As you pour it over the cubes, they bleed into it. “We haven’t even dared tell the head chef how many strawberries go in each ice cube,” says Bertolucci. “As the cubes start to melt, the strawberry flavour gets more and more interesting.” The result is a comfortingly grown-up strawberry milkshake. Just right to watch our boys and girls tumble out of Wimbledon to.

Great British Dessert Cocktails cost £10.50 each. Pearl Restaurant and Bar, 252 High Holborn, London WC1 (020-7829 7000; www.pearl-restaurant.com)

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