Former Royal Chef Reveals Queen Elizabeth's Favorite Homemade Dessert While Dishing On Royal Tea

I'm Darren McGrady, the Royal Chef, former chef to the Queen, Princess Diana, Prince William, and Prince Harry. And today, I'm gonna be making a framboise Saint-Georges. Framboise means raspberries in French. And Saint-Georges, because Saint-Georges is the patron saint of England. So I'm going to start doing the dish as we used to prepare it for the Order of the Garter at Windsor Castle. And for that, I'm trying to build a flag to start with. The flag is the flag of Saint-Georges. And you can see here that that is the Red Cross. King Edward III, in 1348, started the Order of the Knight of the Garter. The Order of the Garter takes place the second Monday of June every year. And the Queen has 24 nights. And they have a procession from Saint-Georges Chapel where they've done a service. And they go up the hill to Windsor Castle. Then, it's this amazing lunch, the Garter Lunch, in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle. The framboise Saint-Georges, the Raspberry Marquis, is actually served all the way through the year, all the way through the season, especially at Balmoral Castle, where they grow the most amazing berries. Balmoral Castle has the most amazing gardens. And one of the things they grow there is incredible berries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, redcurrants, amazing berries. I think the Scottish raspberries are probably the best in the world. I really do. The flavor, the taste, the way they're so dry and hold so well. And because they were so good, whenever the Queen and the royal family were there, they'd eat the berries from the garden all through the summer. The Queen's at Balmoral for eight weeks. And she would just enjoy, with her guests, that royal produce. And she can order foie gras and caviar and things like that many times she wants. But for her to be able to have berries from her garden and then serve them to her guests, I think that's something special. I think that actually means something to her. I remember being at Balmoral, and it was afternoon, I'd been out walking, and I looked over at the gardens and I saw people picking berries. And I thought, that's interesting. I walked across there, and I saw the Queen and Princess Margaret picking berries. And I couldn't believe it. The Queen picking berries in the raspberry cages. Later on that day, they were on the table, and the Queen said, will you make a dessert with the raspberries that we picked tonight? For her, it must have been so much fun and so much pleasure to share with all the family and the guests that her and Princess Margaret had picked the berries for dinner tonight. It's already coming together. You can see the cross. All we need now is the filling to put in the center. We'll mix a little of the raspberry puree with the cream and some sugar, and that will go in the base. And then we'll put some whipped cream around the top, just to create that flag. It wasn't just really the berries that the Queen loved having at the table and sharing with family and friends. It was everything off the estate, really. The venison, the grouse, the partridge, the pheasant, or even the salmon from the River Dee. They were there for eight weeks in Balmoral, and if they could eat the venison, if they could eat the salmon, if they could have all those berries, that was fine. We'd go a week where the Queen was having strawberries and raspberries every night, and she loved it. But if you send strawberries up to the Queen in January, it's like off with your head, off to the tower. You know, I don't want them out of season. When they're in season, and they're gorgeous, and they're beautiful, and they're freshly picked at Balmoral, or whether it's the apples at Sandringham, or the peaches at Windsor, that's what was important to the Queen. I mean, the Queen was really into sort of local produce, local foods, you know, before it even became popular. Next, we're going to whip the cream so that we can fold in some of the raspberries. Now with the rest of the cream, I'm going to add some raspberry puree in there, along with some sugar, and then start to make the fold. I said for long enough about how much the Queen loves chocolate. She does, she loves those chocolate desserts. Another of her favorites were the peaches that were grown at Windsor Castle. Beautiful white peaches, and so full of flavor, and so full of juice. Even when the Queen was at Balmoral Castle, some 800 miles away, she'd have the peaches sent up to Balmoral Castle on a weekend, just so that she could enjoy them. And we'd make peach melba, and peach ice creams, and sorbets, and they'd just go up on their own as a dessert dish. So she loved the berries, she loved the fruit, she loved the apples from the Sandringham estate. We used to make amazing tartatines with the apples from the estate at Sandringham. You know, often the Queen would just have, instead of pudding at night, she'd actually have just a little bowl of berries with some cream, maybe some cream from Windsor, from the beautiful dairy cows down there. So that's the raspberry fall. Smells so good, those berries, and tastes good too. Now it's time to build our flag. It's all about not getting the fall into the berries and making that line of the berries look perfect. It is for the Queen, after all. It wasn't just the Queen that went down to the gardens picking berries with Princess Margaret. Other royals would go down there too, especially in the afternoons at Balmoral. They'd been out shooting in the morning, and it was before afternoon tea, and they'd go out and enjoy the weather. Prince Philip often used to go down there, and he'd be picking away at the plums. He loved the Victoria plums, which were amazing as we sort of went through into the fall at Balmoral. Now it's time for the cream around the top. One time I was out walking in the afternoon with the chefs, and we saw Prince Philip picking the plums, and he got a huge basket of them. And I looked at one of the chefs and said, we need to go back early. I can see we've got lots of jam to make. We used to make the most amazing plum jam, and then that would last all through the year, so it would be sent up to the Queen, whether it was at Sandringham, at Windsor, at Balmoral. We always had that Balmoral jam, whether it was the plums or the raspberries or the strawberries, it lasted through the year. That's our framboise St. George. It looks gorgeous, fit for the Queen, fit for the royal corgis even. I'm not sure that the corgis actually get to eat dessert. I know we used to chop the meat and the rabbit and everything else for them, but I don't think they got dessert. Those corgis, my gosh. I remember going for a walk along the side of the river, and I saw this lady walking towards me, and she got a load of dogs with her, and she got a headscarf on and a barber coat, and I looked again and I thought, oh my gosh, it's the Queen. As she got closer, the dogs saw me, 12 corgis, and they all started barking and then running towards me, and I just stopped and I thought, oh my gosh, I'm gonna get attacked by the corgis. I'm not gonna get to see the Queen after all. I turned and I went running the other way, and the Queen started laughing. Can you believe? The Queen was laughing at me running away from the corgis. The worst time, I think, apart from being chased by them at Balmoral, was probably on the Queen's flight, when they used to come and lay at your feet, and you got your nice suit on because you were traveling with the Queen, and you'd get dog hairs all over you. You couldn't scoot them away because the Queen was just like a few seats ahead, and if they yelped, then you were in trouble. It wasn't just the royals that picked the berries, the chefs had to as well, especially on barbecue nights. Prince Philip would come down to the kitchen and he'd say, oh, there's lots of strawberries in the garden I noticed this afternoon. Let's do an eat and mess to take out to the barbecue, and it was already five o'clock, 5.30, it was getting dark, but for that, it meant all the chefs had to leave what they were doing, and we jumped on bicycles in our chef bikes, and we'd cycle down in like one big formation down to the garden, and we'd go in there picking at the strawberries. Of course, that was fun, we got the ones we wanted, but then, chefs being chefs, we'd start strawberry fighting, and so the first one would throw the strawberries, and by the time we all got back to the kitchen, it looked like we'd just come out of a war scene, these white chef coats with berries over us. I know we shouldn't have done it, but it was fun. Imagine being served that once you've done an order of the garter ceremony, and you've just been promoted and made a knight by her majesty. Time to taste. Where to start? A little of the full, a few of the berries, a little of the whipped cream on there as well. You know, the motto of the order of the garter is Ani Sua Chimali Ponce. It's Latin, and it means shame on him who thinks evil of it. Nobody's gonna think evil of this, are they?