Pink oyster mushroom or Wrinkled peach

The cap is small, from 2 to 6 and rarely up to 10 centimetres across. It's fan-shaped, tongue-shaped or lobed, with a thin, often wavy margin. The surface is smooth or faintly velvety, dry and matte. Colour is this species' crowning glory: bright pink, coral or salmon when young, fading with age to pale pink and cream. The mushrooms grow fused in dense, tiered clusters.

The cap is 3 to 8 cm across, occasionally 10 cm. It starts almost spherical, then becomes convex with an inrolled margin and finally almost flat. Young caps are pink, later peach, salmon, apricot-orange or pinkish red.

The surface is jelly-like, sticky and rubbery, covered in a network of paler veins and pits. The net is clearest on fresh young caps; older or late-season caps can be almost smooth. The cap skin peels off completely.

The underside has gills. They're pink or pinkish-cream like the cap, fairly crowded, and run well down the short stem, decurrent right to the point of attachment. The spore print is pale pink or lilac. Those pink decurrent gills make this species easy to recognise among the oyster mushrooms.

The gills are attached or almost free, pinkish, paler than the cap and salmon pink with age, with many shorter gills in between.

The spore print is very pale pink to cream.

The stem is short or almost absent, usually lateral or off-centre, and pinkish-white; often several mushrooms are fused at a common base into one cluster. The surface is smooth. There's no ring and no volva. The stem flesh is tougher than the cap's, so it's mostly the caps that get eaten.

The stem is short, 1 to 5 cm long and 0.5 to 1.5 cm thick, often curved and off-centre, white to pinkish and covered in white fibres, slightly thicker at the base. There's no ring.

Young stems "bleed", with orange or red droplets on the surface.

The flesh is thin, tender, pinkish or whitish, and doesn't change colour when cut. The taste is mild and pleasant; fried, it reminds some people of bacon or seafood. Because the flesh is so thin, young caps are the ones to choose for the table. The bright pink almost disappears in cooking.

The flesh is springy and rubbery, jelly-like under the cap skin, whitish to pale pink, and doesn't change colour when cut.

Fresh mushrooms smell pleasant, mushroomy and slightly sweet. Smell isn't a defining feature, though: you recognise this mushroom above all by the bright pink-coral colour of its caps, its dense clusters on broadleaf wood and its pink decurrent gills.

The smell is weak: some people notice a faint fruity, apricot-like note, others smell nothing. The taste is bitter.