Today I would like to share with you a recipe for a truly summer dessert. Strawberries are a promise of the impending holiday season.

The combination of crunchy French pastry with a hint of cinnamon with crème and a huge amount of strawberries looks like a picturesque chaos on the plate. It is difficult to eat it elegantly but the sight of my children's delighted faces smeared with crème and strawberries was invaluable.

A similar dessert was prepared on the morning TV program Dzień Dobry TVN. I think that the inspiration for "strawberry mess" was the French dessert mille-feuille or the more familiar-sounding napoleon.

Traditionally, mille-feuille consists of three layers of French pastry arranged alternately with crème or layers of whipped cream and jam. The top is sprinkled with caster sugar, cocoa or decorated with chocolate glaze.

Ingredients (for four people)
1 pack of chilled French pastry
2 tablespoons of brown sugar
1 tablespoon of cinnamon
2 tablespoons of milk
250g of mascarpone cheese

At long last they are here. Big and small, red and not so red, and all smelling of sun and summer. Strawberries. Again I will tread the path to the market for fresh fruit. I already have a special punnet, traditionally bought with the first portion of strawberries. Then, also traditionally and consistently, I will forget to bring it back to the shop to exchange for another one. So towards the end of summer, I will have at least four punnets and the strong resolution of giving them back when I next go shopping.

Today I have a recipe for some simple and extremely tasty mini cheesecakes with ricotta cheese and strawberries. You can make this dessert all year round – it works with every kind of fruit. In the winter serve it with chocolate sauce. This dessert has another asset. You can prepare them the day before and leave them in the fridge. Then you only need to decorate them. Providing that there is something left to decorate...

Ingredients (for 12 small cheesecakes):
250g of ricotta cheese
50g of butter
100g of shortbread biscuits
50g of caster sugar
lemon zest and lemon juice from half of a lemon
1 egg
1 egg yolk
150ml of 30% sweet cream
0.5 kg of strawberries
1 tablespoon of caster sugar.

I like halvah very much, but on a ten-point scale, I estimate its sweetness as fifteen.

I have prepared recently a very simple dessert with halvah, which doesn't cause hyperglycaemia after the first bite. In this dessert I combined the characteristic sesame taste of halvah with a hint of orange and cherry confiture to sharpen the flavour and for decoration. If the confiture you have is too thick, heat it up a bit, so that the purple cherry sauce spills out appetisingly onto the dessert .

Ingredients (for two people)
150g of mascarpone cheese
100g of vanilla halvah
the juice and peel from one orange
100g of oat-sesame cookies
3 tablespoons of cherry confiture

When I put on the table my recently made cake, my family looked incredulous – green, maybe with cabbage or worse still with spinach. I calmed them down a bit with the information that one of the main ingredients is chocolate. Cake and chocolate – it sounds familiar, but this colour ... The secret of the colour and taste of the cake is matcha – a special kind of Japanese green tea. It differs from normal green tea in that it grows in the shade, which is what gives it its intense green colour. The leaves are harvested by hand, dried and triturated.

Matcha is a rich source of antioxidants, which could prevent the progression of cancer, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes. Additionally, it rejuvenates, speeds up the metabolism, reduces stress, boosts immunity and lowers cholesterol.
Matcha is a versatile product. With it you can prepare not only tea, but you can also add it to cakes, cocktails, yoghurts and ice-creams.

The brownie which I prepared with matcha was my first but definitely not my last encounter with this remarkable tea. I'm not the author of the recipe for this cake. I found it in my recipe book, but unfortunately, there was no source.

Ingredients:
110g of butter
300g of white chocolate

For a lot of us, desserts must contain chocolate. I understand perfectly because I like it too. Sometimes, regardless of my love of chocolate, I would like something less sweet, more bracing. I think because of this, this year's counterbalance to the sweet caramel-chocolate Easter cake was a lemon tart. Decorated with colourful light flowers from an edible wafer, it looked very spring-like and was extremely tasty.

My proposal today is a combination of a lime's energizing sourness with the sweetness of two kinds of chocolate and the caramel crunchiness of candies with sesame seeds. Actually, it is difficult to resist the temptation to eat everything at once.

Ingredients:
150ml of 30% sweet cream
100g of white chocolate
2 tablespoons of lime juice
20g of dark chocolate
lime peel
sesame seed candy