Sundae best: how to make a knickerbocker glory

I grew up by the seaside. More precisely, I grew up near South Shields, on the north-east coast – somewhere which is British summer beach country for one, maybe two days a year, and salt-lashed and grey for the rest of it. But come rain or shine, ice cream is a permanent fixture.

Ice cream was such an important part of life that the first school trip I ever went on, aged three, was to an ice-cream factory. I remember being handed an ice cream as big as my (admittedly then quite small) head, and vehemently declining the bright red sauce offered, known locally as ‘monkey blood’. A kindly nursery nurse reassured me it was just raspberry sauce, but I simply wasn’t taking the risk.

But while ice cream by the beach was a deliciously regular occurrence, it was always a passing one. Often it was a 99 on the way home; sometimes it was my favourite, an oyster – a shell-shaped wafer, half coated with chocolate and desiccated coconut, with a lining of mallow encasing Mr Whippy. Ice creams were taken from hatch windows and whisked away to our next destination, the wind gluing hair to sticky faces.

It was rare that we would sit in at one of the ice cream cafés. Perhaps that’s why, when my grandparents took me and my sister, it seemed like such an occasion that I felt compelled to ordered the knickerbocker glory. I can still picture the moment the enormous sundae was presented to me: perfect balls of pale ice cream piled up in tall glass, balancing alongside fruit and nuts, jelly and cream. It felt terribly, terribly glamorous. To my shame, I was quickly out-faced, handing it over to my grandpa to polish off – but then, the knickerbocker glory isn’t a small or subtle dish.