This pudding is the prettiest thing you can eat in the summer. The streaks of the deep pink raspberry purée look stunning against the cream. The pudding was born from memories of the summer, my father and raspberries.

According to my father it is impossible to get the full deliciousness of raspberries without squishing them with the back of a fork, adding a pool of double cream and forking it in with a sprinkle of sugar.

My mother would always be terribly disapproving of his mud pies, convinced that we were going to pick up bad habits from him. “He just likes nursery school puddings,” she would say. We would all agree with her enthusiastically, amazed that our father, of impeccable manners, might be doing something vaguely naughty.

However, now that a few years have passed, I think he had a point. Crushing the raspberries releases the juice to mix with the cream and, in the recipe below, the flavours of the pudding wine, cassis (a blackcurrant liqueur) and roses. The recipe is really a type of syllabub, a sweet, frothy dessert introduced by the Elizabethans. The cassis gives the raspberries an extra charge of berry flavour and the juices run into each other, creating intoxicating mouthfuls of summer fruit. I prefer raspberries to strawberries, and it seems I'm not alone. Apparently we ate 7,500 tonnes of them last year.

Happily for all of us, raspberries are in great shape this year. Our wet but warm May slowed the crop's growth, giving the berries extra time to develop their sweet, fruity flavour. According to experts, these are the best British raspberries we will have tasted for years. I love them in my Pimm's, they are a total luxury in yoghurt and cereal for breakfast, and far outshine strawberries sandwiched between a couple of squidgy meringues. Or whiz them up to make an elegant icy granita for pudding, or a creamy, home-made ice-cream.

Whatever you do though, don't eat them from the fridge. Let them breathe at room temperature and you'll get every ounce of flavour from them (as long as you have a fork).

Thomasina's raspberry pudding

Times Recommends

• How to season a wok
• Chicago Rib Shack hits back at its critics
• Gordon Ramsay: Indian barbecue