Floral fruits

Wrinkled purple skin gives away nothing. Crack one open and you get the most aromatic juice in the tropics — bright, tart, perfumed, with crunchy black seeds suspended in golden jelly. One spoon eaten straight, or drizzle the pulp over yogurt, ice cream, or a pavlova that needs the lift.

An orange passion fruit on the outside, a gentler animal on the inside. The brittle shell cracks like an egg to reveal grey-translucent jelly around crunchy black seeds — sweet, honeyed, floral, with almost none of the tartness of its cousins. The dessert passion fruit.

A red shell covered in soft hairs, peeled back to reveal translucent grape-like flesh around a single seed. The flavour is lychee turned a half-step softer — sweeter, jucier, gentler on the rose perfume. If lychee is a soprano, rambutan is the alto.

The rose-scented summer classic. A pink, knobbled shell cracks under a thumbnail to release translucent flesh around a polished mahogany seed. Sweet, floral, perfumed — the fresh fruit eats nothing like the tinned version most people grew up with. Eat cold, eat fast.

The queen of fruits, and she earns the title every time. A dense port-purple shell, snow-white segments arranged like garlic cloves, a flavour that sits between lychee, peach and perfumed sorbet. Banned fresh in the US for decades — eat one and you'll understand why people went to the trouble.

Pale green skin, hot-pink centre. The aroma walks into the room before the fruit does — tropical, floral, faintly musky. Eat skin and all, seeds and all; the seeds are crunchy and entirely edible. Vitamin-C density that puts oranges in the shade, and a flavour you can taste at three paces.

Eats like a crisp apple soaked in rosewater. Bell-shaped, glossy red-pink skin, hollow at the core, snap-crisp throughout. The flavour is light and floral rather than sugary — a palate cleanser between heavier tropical fruits, or a snack on a hot day with a pinch of salt.

The original chocolate, in its raw form. Long ridged pods open onto sweet white pulp wrapped around the beans — the pulp eats like lychee sorbet, the beans are what becomes chocolate once they're fermented and roasted. Rarely seen outside the cacao belt, almost never sold whole in the UK.

Apricot-gold fruit that only appears for a few weeks in late spring. Tastes somewhere between peach, mango and pear, with a clean floral edge and a juice content that overwhelms the small fruit it's hidden inside. Bruises if you look at it the wrong way — selected from gift-grade growers.

The Japanese cultivar runs larger, pulpier and markedly sweeter than the South American passion fruit most people know. Less tart, more dessert — Kagoshima growers select for a balance that reads as gift-grade rather than market-stall. Same intoxicating perfume, half the acidity.