I made a hand picked juicy blackberry cheesecake this afternoon. A tad complicated and not the easiest thing to make when you're camping either. I was having one of those crazy creative moments in our camping kitchen and had the brainwave of a blackberry cheesecake. Something quite unique and a little bit different to the strawberry and blackcurrant ones we sometimes buy from the shops. Although the hush-hush element no camping chef likes to admit, is that it did involve going to the local shop and buying a ready made cheesecake and then I hand picked the blackberries to go on top myself. Ultimately a 100% hand picked cheesecake. Hand picked from the shelf in the supermarket and hand picked berries from the prickly blackberry bush too. Anyway, it looked looked delicious and we all tucked in.

The puzzling thing was though, that some mouthfuls were amazingly delicious and the next mouthfuls were completely disgusting. Some bites were lovely and then the bites that followed were quite repulsive.

'Bleuk!' we all said.

All eyes glared across at me, with inquisitive faces and thoughts racing across their minds. They didn't need to say anything. I could almost tell what they were thinking and in any case, I was sure I was thinking the same thing.

'Maybe the blackberries are off' someone said.

'They can't be. I picked them fresh this morning with my own ninja hands' I replied, proudly opening a Tupperware box and showcasing the remainder of the blackberries I'd picked earlier.

There was a gasp of 'oooh' as Eric looked into the Tupperware box, impressed.

'The bigger ones look nice' remarked Elwood.

'That, is not a blackberry!' Susie exclaimed, pointing at one of the smaller, flatter fruits.

Well there's no need to be size-ist I thought, ushering the poor, runted blackberries away.

'I do not know what it is but that (as she pointed disgustedly) is not a blackberry!' she repeated, as if we hadn't heard her the first time.

It was a steep learning curve on the blackberry front for me. You see there are blackberries and there are fake blackberries. They may look like the same thing but they taste completely different and taste is the all important difference between a nice juicy blackberry and a concoction so vile that it made us all gag with every mouthful. One berry makes great cheesecakes and the other one is really only meant to be eaten by desperately hungry pigeons. And yet they grow happily alongside each other on lookalike bushes of beauty and the beast waiting for some unsuspecting hands to pick them off and pop them on top of a cheesecake.

The whole thing was such an unfortunate episode that due to the severity of the blackberry blunder, I had to make a pact to stick to only cooking scrambled eggs for the rest of the week, with a promise to be more cautious with my ingredients in the camping kitchen in future. Oh well, chicken magic for the rest of the week it is then!