Ice Cream Loving

Although its now Autumn (and some days feels like winter) a couple of weeks ago I got myself and ice cream making machine. I love it!

It took a few unsuccessful attempts, but I’ve now mastered a classic vanilla ice cream recipe, and even got as far as making a strawberry ripple. My main learnings are:

– to make classic ice cream you must first make custard, let it cool, mix it with cream and then put through the ice cream machine (which freezes while churning)
– the ice bucket part of the machine must be properly frozen before you attempt to use it, this takes at least half a day, not a couple of hours
– 30-45 minutes of churning creates the best texture

So here’s the recipe for vanilla ice cream, taken from the Andrew James recipe book I got with my machine.

1. Make custard:
– warm 300ml of milk with a split vanilla pod in (seeds scraped out) until just before it starts to boil. Take off the heat and cover for 20 minutes.
– whisk 3 egg yolks with 100g of caster sugar. Add the vanilla milk to the eggs and sugar, whisk well, then pour back into the pan and remove the vanilla pod.
– warm over a medium heat, stirring constantly, until the custard thickens, coating the back of a spoon.
– leave to cool completely.

2. To make ice cream
– whisk in a 284ml tub of double cream into the custard
– pour into your ice cream machine (turned on) and leave to churn for 30 minutes (it however long your machine needs)

Once done, transfer into a tub and put in the freezer until you want to serve. I found that freezing for an hour after churning helped the ice cream firm up.

To make strawberry ripple, while churning blend strawberries with a couple if tablespoons of caster sugar. Ripple through with a spoon once the ice cream is ready (if you pour it into the machine it will just mix in).

Back to baking

I’ve had a bit of a blogging gap, sometimes other things in life like the day job just get in the way but this weekend I turned the oven on and got back to baking – starting with these rhubarb and strawberry tarts.

I’ll admit I cheated using ready made (and ready rolled) shortcrust pastry.

I always worry about rhubarb being bitter so I started sweetening it in the morning by chopping it into a bowl with the strawberries, a tablespoon of sugar and a split vanilla pod.

Once I’d put my cut out tart bases into a greased and floured cupcake tray with my brother who was visiting from Sweden we put half a teaspoon of strawberry jam in each and spooned as much rhubarb and strawberry mix on top as would fit.

As the oven was on while John was filling the tarts I tried the recently posted recipe by Frugal Feeding for gluten free coffee blondies. (I’d never actually heard of a blondie before so not sure if they’d usually have fluted in them?)

Mixture made, both went into the oven on 180 for 20 minutes.