Berry Vol-au-vent

A friend of mine admits that she doesn't love making desserts, but the other night she made the most beautiful vol-au-vent stuff with Chantilly cream and fresh berries. I know it sounds very flash, but she cheated a bit and it works a treat so I'm going to share it with you today. So these are store-bought vol-au-vents. You can actually get them everywhere. Now for the Chantilly cream. Chantilly cream is a fancy French way of saying cream that's whipped with icing sugar So I've just given myself a bit of a head start here and I've started to whip some cold thickened cream along with about three quarters of a cup of icing sugar that I've sifted and a good teaspoon of vanilla bean paste. To this I love to add some lime zest and this is my little twist. It just gives it a lovely freshness and it goes so well with the berries. So in with some zest and we'll reserve half of it for a garnish later on. So I'll just give this a whisk until we've got stiff peaks. So all we need to do is grab a generous dollop of this Chantilly cream and fill up each of these vol-au-vents. Now what makes this really impressive is the berries. Now I've got these gorgeous fresh blackberries and some raspberries. With these blackberries cut some of them in half and leave some whole and we just want to top them generously with just a few and you can mix up the berries. So some can have a few more raspberries or just a half of the blackberry. I really like it to look organic just like that and to finish them off a little bit more lime zest over the top and can you believe that is just the simplest of desserts. What makes this so special is the freshness of the berries. If you've got really good quality berries then the rest speaks for itself. Cream, berries in a vol-au-vent, sounds fancy, super easy to do.