Fruit-forward desserts for the warmer months

Summer desserts have a different brief from winter ones. The oven gets used grudgingly. The fridge becomes the active appliance. Texture wants to be cold, light, layered. Heavy chocolate cakes feel out of place; a no-bake tart, a fruit cobbler, or a parfait of yoghurt and fresh berries reads correctly for the season.

Quality of fruit is the whole game in summer dessert. A peach cobbler in February is mostly the cobbler topping - the peaches are pale and watery. The same recipe in July is the peaches; the topping is just a frame. Buy stone fruit at the farmers' market when you can, eat it within three days, and don't try to "improve" what's already at peak with too much sugar.

Acid is the unsung hero of summer dessert. A squeeze of lemon over a strawberry, a splash of balsamic in the macerated berries, a pinch of citric acid in the sorbet base - these are the small contrasts that keep a fruit dessert from reading as one-note sweet. The savvy fruit cooks taste with a thin slice of lemon next to the bowl.

Frozen desserts forgive a lot. A so-so sorbet base becomes a great sorbet through churning; a plain Greek yoghurt becomes a frozen yoghurt with thirty seconds of mixing in the right ratios. If you've got an ice cream maker - even a cheap one - the summer dessert calendar opens up dramatically.

The eight here cover the formats summer wants: a frozen yoghurt, a sorbet, a parfait, a cobbler, a no-bake tart. None requires the oven for more than thirty minutes, several require none at all, and they're all built around fruit at its summer peak.