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.