Backsweetening a strawberry melomel?

Hey all, I'm fairly new to meadmaking and have a quick question.

I made a 3-gallon batch of strawberry melomel in June (red star champagne yeast, wildflower honey), and it seems like it's all fermented out and everything, beautiful color, perfectly clear, smells spectacularly of strawberries, and I'd be bottling it now except that the taste is ridiculously dry and tart. I want to sweeten it up but am wondering- do I need to sulfite it to be absolutely sure it's done fermenting first? Will honey at this point make it cloudy or have some other negative effect? And how much should I use? I tend to like sweeter meads but would be happy if this one just didn't pucker my face like biting a lemon.

If anybody has any advice I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

Fair enough Here is the recipe I followed, in italics; the only difference is that I substituted the product of my own beehives for all 10 pounds of honey and the different yeast as noted after the recipe:

Strawberry Melomel

Source: Dick Dunn (rcd@raven.eklektix.com)
Mead Lovers Digest #171, 10 July 1993

Ingredients:

6 lb clover honey
4 lb alfalfa honey
12 lb strawberries
Red Star Prise de Mousse yeast
4 oz dextrose (bottling)

Procedure:

Start the yeast in about a pint of water with a few tablespoons of
dextrose. Be sure the starter solution and jar are sterile, and at 70-
80F before adding yeast. This yeast should start quickly--a few hours
at most.

Clean and hull the strawberries; chop into a few pieces. (Don't crush
them or you'll have an impossible mess at racking.) Put them into a
sanitized plastic-pail primary.

Bring 4 gallons of water to a full boil. Remove from heat and
immediately add the honey; stir thoroughly. (This will sterilize the
honey without cooking the flavor out of it.) Cool to about 150-160F,
pour over the berries in the primary fermenter. Cool to pitching
temperature (below 80F) and add yeast starter. Stir thoroughly to mix
and aerate.

Every day or two, push the floating mass of strawberries down into the
fermenting mead (the equivalent of a winemaker's "punching down the
cap").

After the strawberries have become very pale--probably ten days or more-
- strain out as much of the strawberry mass as possible, then rack into
a glass carboy. Be prepared for the racking tube to clog.

Ferment to completion. If necessary, fine with gelatin.

I'll admit I used the champagne yeast because that was all I had on hand, and I was in a hurry because my fresh-picked strawberries were not dealing well with the heat. I couldn't get a decent gravity reading because of the fruit (which was removed as per the timetable in the recipe) but 10 days later on June 17 when I could get a reading it was 1.000. The thing fermented like crazy On September 3 it was .994 so I assume it's not changed TOO much between now and then, although I was going to check it again this evening. I wanted to have a game plan before I messed with it at all, though. Let's see, what else... been off the fruit for ages, and is perfectly clear although nicely strawberry-tinted.

excellent thanks!