Be still my beating heart. The strawberries this year are astounding.

They’re enormous, some of them, they’re prolific and they taste like you remember strawberries tasted when you were a kid. Sweet but slightly tart and drippingly juicy.

I don’t know whether it’s the weather but whatever the reason this season, we’ve been eating pounds of them, still warm from the sun.

So what do you do when you’ve got vast quantities of strawberries? It’s too hot to be making jam.

The answer, it seemed to me, was to multiply the strawberry flavours. So I made a big bowl of coulis – or strawberry sauce, fruit soup, call it what you will – to eat with yet more fresh berries.

A lot of recipes for coulis tell you to cook the fruit lightly with sugar before pureeing it.

But I didn’t want to lose the fresh taste, so I pureed it raw with icing (confectioners’) sugar.

Hull and slice the strawberries into a deep bowl and for every pound (450g) of fruit add three ounces (85g) of icing sugar.

Puree. A liquidiser helps but it’s perfectly possible to do it with a hand blender.

Sieve the mixture to get the pips out. You’re supposed to use a nylon sieve but I found a fine-meshed metal sieve did the job.

Add a small squeeze of lemon juice  to sharpen the taste. The coulis will keep in the fridge for up to three days and it freezes well.

It seems to me, though I haven’t tried it yet, that you could also use the mixture to make a strawberry sorbet. A delicious prospect later in the season, maybe with a few fresh raspberries and some home made shortbread.