Creamy fruits

Spiky green skin hides a pulpy white flesh with a flavour the Caribbean built juices around — pineapple meets strawberry meets banana cream, with a fibrous, custardy texture and a clean tartness on the finish. Hand-sized fruit will feed two; larger fruits, double that.

Lumpy heart-shaped skin, white flesh inside that scoops out like cold custard. Ripe, it's pure dessert with zero processing — sweet, creamy, faintly tropical, with seeds you spit aside as you go. Chill before eating; warm custard apple is half the fruit it should be.

Around four inches long and engineered for a single hand. Creamier than a Cavendish, more honeyed, with a denser texture that holds its shape when sliced. The whole fruit is one perfect bite — and once you've eaten one you'll resent every supermarket banana you ever ate before.

Alphonso-style: smaller, less fibrous, deeper orange, more aromatic. The mango people compare every other mango to. Score, scoop, eat — or halve and spoon out cold. One ripe baby mango is one breakfast, one dessert, or one of the better small decisions you'll make this week.

Grown to an exact weight, ripened on the branch, and shipped in a velvet-lined wooden box. The most precisely farmed mango on earth — Taiyo-no-Tamago, "Egg of the Sun" — and the closest thing the fruit world has to a luxury watch. Single fruits have sold at Japanese auction for record sums.

A hybrid of cherimoya and sugar-apple — knobbled green skin hides a snow-white pulp that scoops out like soft ice cream. Spoonable dessert before you've done anything to it. Yields like a ripe avocado when ready.

Russet-brown skin, salmon-orange flesh, single mahogany seed. Mamey tastes like sweet potato, pumpkin pie and marzipan all at once — dense, smooth and unmistakably Central American. Eat with a spoon, straight from the half.

A small Mexican mango bred for pure sweetness — fibre-free, butter-textured, honey-sweet. A candy bar masquerading as a fruit. The cultivar of choice for premium mango lassi and sticky-rice desserts.