And so, the end of my Ice-Cream Sunday project is here...








Hot Cherry Fudge Sundae: Vanilla, Mocha, Hot Burgundy Cherry Sauce, Hot Fudge Sauce

Ice-Cream List

Vanilla
Mocha
Banana Frozen Yogurt
Apple
Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
Gooseberry & Elderflower
Bellini Sorbetto
Butter Pecan
Triple Chocolate Semifreddo
Peanut Butter


Sauces

Hot Fudge Sauce (Ben & Jerry's)
Hot Burgundy Cherries (Ben & Jerry's)
Butterscotch Sauce (Nigella's Forever Summer)


Accompaniments

Blueberries, Strawberries, Raspberries
Toasted flaked almonds
Hundreds & Thousands
Chocolate cookie pieces

The ice-creams had all been made in advance. On the day itself, I put out the glasses...

...made the sauces...

Ben & Jerry's Hot Fudge Sauce: It is thick and grainy until you add cream and milk, and whisk over heat for 20 minutes.

Ben & Jerry's Hot Burgundy Cherries: Cherries, cooked with sugar, lemon juice and zest.

...prepared the accompaniments...

...made the labels...

...and we dug in!

My bowl - all flavours combined into mush.

A Cecconi's special: Vanilla ice-cream with fresh berries. Heaven in a glass!

Nigella's "pure, unapologetic perfection": Apple ice-cream, butterscotch sauce and toasted, flaked almonds.

The most popular flavours were chocolate-chip cookie dough, apple and vanilla. The other fruited flavours didn't move very much at all. The Ben & Jerry's flavours (mocha, butter-pecan, chocolate-chip cookie dough), were impressively easy to scoop, and didn't require as much softening time as the others. I tried to give everyone small scoops in small bowls so that we could try as much as possible, but by the end of the evening, we were all quite full and on a massive sugar high.

Catherine: I'm so full - just on ice-cream! I didn't realise that was possible!

What a wonderfully indulgent day!

Thank-you, thank-you.

I made two fruited ice-creams for my ice-cream party on Sunday. Apple, at the insistent request of my best friend, and banana frozen yoghurt. The apple ice-cream is from Nigella's Forever Summer, while the banana frozen yoghurt is adapted from Nigel Slater's banana ice-cream recipe in Real Food.

I bought a big bag of apples from Yering Farm on the weekend, when I was up in the Yarra Valley for the Grape Grazing festival. They were fantastic; really sweet, crunchy, and more intensely apple-y than supermarket apples.

I needed a kilo of these apples to make ice-cream. Peeled, cored, chopped, and cooked with sugar until soft and mushy. Don't be afraid to cook the apples until quite dry - the higher the water content of an ice-cream, the harder and icier it is. Then you need to combine the apple puree with the usual egg custard, and churn.

The banana frozen yogurt is even easier. I'm not in the habit of posting entire recipes on this blog, but I'm posting this one because it is so easy to make, and doesn't require an ice-cream machine. And more importantly, I hope that this will encourage some of you to buy Nigel Slater's wonderful book! Go Nigel.

Banana Ice-Cream (Nigel Slater's Real Food)

4 medium-sized, very ripe bananas
the juice of half a lemon
200g golden caster sugar
500ml whipping cream

Peel and roughly chop the bananas and whizz them in a blender or food processor with the lemon juice and sugar. Pour in the cream and continue to blend until well mixed. Pour into a rectangular freezer box or a loaf tin. As the mixture starts to freeze, ice crystals will form around the outside. Carefully stir these into the centre. Depending on your freezer, it should be ready in about five hours. You will need to remove it about fifteen minutes before you intend to serve it.

I substitued half the cream with Greek yogurt, and I did use my ice-cream maker instead of manually breaking up the ice-crystals. However, Nigel says that this ice-cream works particularly well without an ice-cream maker, and I have no reason not to believe him.

I tasted both ice-creams before freezing - and so far they seemed good. I will give the verdict of the finished products tomorrow, along with photos.

This is the basic ice-cream recipe. Cream, egg yolks, sugar and vanilla - combined and then cooked slowly over a low heat until thick and velvety and gorgeous. Unlike the plain American Ben & Jerry's ice-creams bases, which are very suitable for delightfully garish flavour and textural additions, the cooked-custard base is best when flavoured quite simply. I wouldn't say that one is better than the other; they are simply different. There is always room in my heart (and stomach) for more than one ice-cream.

Excuse me while I rant about vanilla. Vanilla's flavour and fragrance are completely irresistible, both warm and seductive. Using real vanilla beans in your cooking will give you a flavour that is so much better than anything you could get out of a bottle. You can use vanilla beans in baking, although I think they work best in custards and ice-creams. Simply use a sharp knife to open the vanilla bean, scrape the seeds into your cream, drop the whole bean in there too, and warm the cream gently on the stove. You are now in flavour country.

I used Nigella's recipe for vanilla ice-cream, which is printed in both How to Eat and Forever Summer. It is just a matter of warming and flavouring the cream, as explained above, pouring it over egg yolks beaten with sugar, and then stirring the whole mixture over a low heat for about 10 minutes until thick and smooth. You must let it cool completely before churning it, or else it will not freeze correctly. However, vanilla ice-cream is actually one of the easiest ice-cream flavours to freeze - there is no fruit or water in it (which would make it icy and hard), or any other additions which would affect the freezing process. You just need to make sure that the mixture is cold before you churn it, it is churned for long enough (about 10-15 minutes), and, once frozen, you let it sit out of the freezer for another 10 minutes before scooping it. This will give you smooth, wonderfully scoop-able ice-cream.

















I suppose the versatility of this ice-cream means that you could eat it ice-cream with any addition you like - hot fudge sauce, fruit compote, a hot apple pie and so on. But vanilla ice-cream, real vanilla ice-cream, is a wonderful flavour in its own right, and stands perfectly well as it is.

One scoop, one bowl, one spoon. Bliss.

Those of you following my Ice-Cream Sunday Project will have noticed that I tend to use ice-cream recipes that have a cooked custard as their base. However, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one way to make an ice-cream.















Butter Pecan Ice-Cream

Ben & Jerry's ice-creams involve no cooking at all. They give 3 ice-cream base recipes in their cookbook, each of which requires you to do no more than whisk the ingredients together. To make their most popular base, "No. 1", you need to whisk eggs until light and fluffy, then whisk in some sugar, and finally add cream and milk. Easy peasy.

This week, I made the following flavours, based on their "Sweet Cream Base No. 1".

- Butter Pecan
- Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
- Mocha

Here are the pecans for the butter pecan ice-cream. You melt butter in a pan, add pecan nuts and a small amount of salt (very important for the taste!), and toast until the nuts are crispy. Then you set them aside to cool down, and add the cooled butter to the sweet cream base, before churning it. Once it's almost frozen, you tip in the toasted nuts.
















For the chocolate chip cookie dough flavour, you simply add chunks of frozen chocolate chip cookie dough (which I saved from the last time I made cookies) to the sweet cream base once it's nearly frozen.

The mocha ice-cream, as you would expect, has cocoa and coffee powder added to the mixture.

Now, I'm actually saving all these ice-creams for Sunday 25th of Febuary, so you will have to wait for the rest of the photos. I'm having a big ice-cream party, naturally. But as you can see from the first photo, I did have a sneaky taste of the butter pecan. The nuts were crispy and salty and wonderful. And the ice-cream had a smooth, easy-to-scoop texture. Woo!

However, because the ice-cream bases aren't made from a cooked custard, they have a much less pronounced eggy taste, and are very plain. I don't think that the sweet cream base would be very tasty or interesting if you churned it without a lot of additions. This means, however, that the bases make an excellent background for strong flavours, like nut chunks, brownies, cookies, caramel, fudge, malteasers, peanut butter cups.... how appropriate for Ben & Jerry!

This is just a quick post to show y'all what we ate for Chinese new year's eve dinner on Saturday night. Every Chinese new year's eve the family gets together for reunion dinner, and we eat delicious Malaysian-Chinese food, prepared lovingly by my mum.

Loh-Bak: Minced belly pork, mixed with spices, wrapped in beancurd skin and deep-fried. Mum serves it with batons of cucumber and a chilli/tomato dipping sauce.
















Kiam Chye-Th'ng: Salted Vegetable soup. This soup contains salted vegetables (available from your local Chinese grocery shop), with mushrooms, tomatoes, and duck maryland. Traditionally there is a pork leg in the soup as well, and you can easily add crispy roast pork or duck (from your local Hong-Kong BBQ takeaway shop) to bulk it up. The broth has a very rich flavour, and my mouth waters just thinking about it. Mmm!
















Curry Chicken Kapitan: A basic chicken curry, with a coconut milk and onion base. My mum now uses Aunty Winnie's recipe, which has lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves added. Fabulous!















Happy New Year!!!

Look, deep down I know that Valentine's Day is a completely commercial holiday, designed by gift card-companies to make money. But some things are just too cute to pass up!















I whipped up a batch of Nigella's Coca-Cola Cupcakes last night to commemorate this "holiday". (And really, there is no other way to describe the process; they are so deligtfully easy and cheap, that the only way you can make them is to "whip them up"). This also gave me a chance to break out these fab sprinkles that I bought recently.

I love cupcakes, but I'm really over those overpriced Magnolia Bakery-wannabe cupcakes, covered with piped icing and perfect little sugar roses and hearts. They seem to be available at every bakery in Melbourne, and have been advertised like crazy in every Sunday newspaper colour supplement and women's magazine over the past few weeks. If you happen to be in the mood for a perfect cupcake, then my recommendation is to ignore the imitations and just bake a batch of Magnolia cupcakes from their recipe book.

But let's go back to my decidedly imperfect cupcakes. I think that the slightly wonky look of these cupcakes adds to their charm. That's my excuse, anyway.


















They would make a lovely gift. Or better yet, it would be a really cute idea to make and decorate these with your loved one on Valentine's Day, (if your loved one goes in for that sort of thing). Nigella's Coca-Cola cupcakes are particularly suitable for romantic baking with your partner because the icing is very sweet and sticky, and tends to be quite messy. You know what I mean.
















If, however, you are single on Valentine's Day, and the whole thing's getting you down, then make the cupcakes anyway and eat them all yourself. Muahaha!