What I'm cooking and eating

24 August 2012

Gran's strawberry ice-cream

I haven't made this in years, and had forgotten all about it until I reread Clothilde's coconut ice-cream recipe, which is what I have made this week (substituting creme de framboise for the rum and adding some frozen rasps to make it a raspberry-coconut ice-cream).  So when I was buying the evaporated milk for this recipe, I bought a second tin, and a tin of strawberries, too, and this will be made very soon:

1 tin evaporated milk
1 tin strawberries

Whisk together (no need to puree too hard, it's rather nice with bits of strawberry in it) and freeze.  Couldn't be easier.

Although when I make it, I'll probably add 2 tbs creme de fraise (this is how you use all those fruit liqueurs you buy in France and seldom, if ever, drink when back in the UK!) as alcohol does seem to make ice-creams freeze better.

Edit: I did make this and it was horrible!  Tasted of evaporated milk!  Greek yoghurt is a much better idea!

18 August 2012

Peach and butterscotch ice-cream

This didn't quite come out how I intended, but I don't actually care, it is very, very good!  Quantities for the peach bit are approximate - depends on how many peaches/how much yoghurt/etc, you have.

5 ripe peaches
3 tbs white sugar
About the same amount, or a little more, Greek yoghurt (depends how much you have!)
About 150 ml whipping cream
2 tbs peach liqueur (optional)

1 quantity butterscotch sauce using David Lebovitz' wonderful recipe (Please note that "heavy cream" is apparently whipping cream, not double).

Soak the peaches in boiling water for c 1 minute until the skins slip off easily.  Remove them, the put the flesh in a large bowl.  Blitz with a stick blender (or use a food processor) until you have a smooth puree.  Now add the sugar, yoghurt, cream and liqueur, if using, and continue to blitz until well mixed.  Chill thoroughly in the fridge, and freeze in ice-cream maker.

I meant to make the butterscotch sauce go through the ice-cream as a ripple, but either it wasn't quite cold enough, or the peach ice-cream wasn't quite as frozen as I'd thought, as it went a bit liquid, plus there was rather too much for the ice-cream maker. So I emptied most of the frozen peach into a freezer-proof bowl, and continued to work the ice-cream maker with the liquid remains; it didn't really freeze solid, but enough so I could add it in to the rest of the stuff. Of course we had quite a lot of tastes that night - but really, next day when I came to try it, it had turned into a sort of marbled-effect ice-cream, and was (and still is) seriously delicious!  Not quite sure if it's reproducible, though!

10 August 2012

Lemon chocolate sorbet

I do own an ice-cream maker, but the bowl tends to sit in the freezer taking up space and the other bits do likewise on top of the fridge.  So when we got a new fridge-freezer recently the Swan Whisperer more or less said "Use it or lose it".

So I was half planning to make Clothilde's wonderful dark chocolate sorbet anyway, but yesterday a friend said that for her, one scoop of chocolate ice-cream and one scoop of lemon sorbet was a match made in heaven.

So I thought, well, why not lemon chocolate sorbet?  I cut back the water a bit from Clothilde's recipe, and upped the sugar in order to add the lemons.

3 unwaxed lemons
140 g granulated sugar
250 ml water
40 g unsweetened cocoa powder
80 g good-quality dark chocolate (70% at a bare minimum)
2 tbs limoncello

Either peel the lemons very finely (don't get any of the white pith) with a potato peeler or grate the rind on a lemon zester or equvalent.  Place into heatproof jug with the sugar, and pour the boiling water over this.  Stir well and leave to stand while you squeeze the lemons and chop the chocolate into as small pieces as you can be bothered.

Put the cocoa powder into a saucepan and strain the lemon water on to it.  Whisking and stirring all the time, bring to the boil, and, as soon as it boils up (don't let it boil over!), pour it on to the chopped chocolate (which you have, of course, transferred to the jug you originally used to steep the lemon peel).  Stir vigorously until the chocolate dissolves and you have a smooth fluid.  Now add the lemon juice and limoncello (you can leave this out if you don't have any, or if children are going to eat this, but all sorbets and ice creams are improved with a little alcohol in them), stir again, and leave to cool.  When cool, chill thoroughly in fridge.

Freeze in your ice-cream maker (or in a shallow tray, stirring every hour to break up the crystals) and enjoy!  I served with a peach-and-raspberry sauce (home-made) and some thick cream with limoncello which I'd happened to see in Tesco's earlier.

VERDICT:  Tastes absolutely lovely, but a little watery.  Not sure quite how to deal with that - perhaps make sure there is no more than 275 ml total of liquid, whether lemon juice or water, and then bring it all to the boil together, and strain out the lemon peel before adding the solid chocolate?  Or boil for longer?

It would be greedy to have a second helping, wouldn't it?


EDITED: Made this again last week (10 November) and altered it to about 250 g sugar to 200 ml water/lemon juice, which I brought to the boil, boiled hard for one minute, then added the cocoa powder, brought it back just to the boil (this was my grandmother's chocolate sauce recipe: 6 oz sugar, 1/4 pint water, 2 oz cocoa powder),  then added the chopped chocolate.  Much better - thicker, and less watery.  And rather too much limoncello so it didn't freeze quite properly, but was none the worse for that!