The Pineapple Encore

I already made a tea ice cream for  Chinese New Year week , so I decided this week would be coffee. I really wanted to be a coffee snob; as you’ve seen, I like tinkering with culinary based hobbies, I think I would have loved trying different beans and ways of grinding and experimenting with the temperatures and drip rates. One minor problem: I don’t like the taste of coffee. I once spent a week with my colleagues thinking I was pregnant because I said the smell of their coffee was making me feel sick, but that’s just how it gets me sometimes. It goes away, I’m not always quite that adverse to coffee even if I don’t like it myself, but I still hear about it as ‘the time (I) tried to ban coffee’;  I didn’t, I bought everyone lids for their mugs, and yet the slander persists. The nice thing about this recipe is, it’s essentially just an ice cream I already know how to make - custard ice cream - with some coffee beans thrown in. No formulating needed and, because the coffee beans...

I was initially not sure what to do for With a Twist week. The first thought was some form of drink/cocktail based ice cream, taking ‘with a twist’ as in ‘scotch on the rocks.’ But, I don’t drink, and none of the classic drinks that come with a twist (a twist being a small slice of fruit, usually citrus of some sort) had easy non-alcoholic versions; they tend to be very alcohol based, unlike something like a piña colada which essentially turns into a pineapple coconut milkshake. There was an excellent cocktail bar in Wrexham (yes, the city where Ryan Reynolds owns the football team) called Voodoo Moon that made the best virgin piña coladas, and everything really - I’m still sad it’s closed now. I digress. No cocktail based ice cream. So instead I looked at other uses of ‘ with a twist’, and landed on the Todd Rundgren album With A Twist, bossa nova style versions of his previous songs, and I thought yes. Brazil.  (I promise this becomes relevant in a minute.) We tend to think of ve...

Remember  citrus week  and the insanely expensive cederata or citron ice cream? As we left it, I had a bag of sugar and grated citron peel slowly making cederata essence for a month. Today is the day that we find out how that went.  Making the cederata essence   Ingredients  Finely grated citron rind (the yellow bit and a bit of the pith, the white bit, although this doesn’t grate easily - trust me!)  Caster sugar  You notice I have no weights; that’s because Nutt didn’t either; he said ‘allow for every quarter of a pound (of grated rind) two pounds of sugar’ … so multiply the weight of your grated citron rind by eight, and use that much sugar. Method 1. Mix the grated rind and sugar together, so the rind is well mixed in and the sugar turns a pale yellow colour. 2. Place into a bag, squeeze it tightly and tie it to be as airtight as possible. 3. Put the bag into a pot - I used my stock pot - and compress the bag - I used a cake tin filled with heavy s...

Last week, I considered making two different versions of the same ice cream, following the differences between two of the Gunter’s confectioners. That’s what I’m doing here, with chocolate.  In a possibly heretical statement, I don’t really like chocolate. It’s fine but there are flavours I much prefer, and after a while I wish I were eating something else. So, three different chocolate ice creams was rather a lot for me! Sometimes, the Gunter’s confectioners broadly agree; sometimes only one or two of them have a recipe for a certain flavour - Nutt used a lot of fruits the others didn’t but had no vanilla recipe, for example. Chocolate is one of the flavours where they all had a recipe but they were all wildly different. The most interesting difference is, it seems as though Jarrin and Jeanes used a different version of chocolate to Nutt. Both of them referred to dissolving chocolate in water, unlike Nutt who simply takes chocolate and ‘warms’ it. (Nutt also uses a lot less chocol...

I am becoming a British cliche for Chinese New Year week: I like tea.  Originally, all tea was Chinese, it entered Europe via Portugal in the early mid 1500s, Britain in the mid 1600s and we really ran with it once we had it. It was a shame, then, that our supply of it was dependent upon the good humour of China; whilst the tea was imported to Britain via the East India Company, the tea was Chinese and only left China with agreement. It was paid for in opium, grown in the British colonies, and when the Chinese officials cracked down on opium it led to the Opium Wars (in which the ‘right’ to flood a country with drugs was brutally fought for) and the British realisation that we needed to be self sufficient in tea. There was a daring scheme to smuggle tea plants out of China and grow them within the British empire, in India. It was undertaken by a man called Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist, who travelled China in disguise for several years, gathering samples and spiriting them aw...

One of the bizarre things in the Harry Potter universe is how mundane the food is, although I’ve heard from many non-English fans that there are plenty of foods other people assumed were magical but no, they’re just British and weird. Like treacle tart - apparently that isn’t a thing in America? Seeing as I’m also British and weird, these foods didn’t seem magical to me and we’re back to my mundane point. When I saw week five of 52 Weeks of Ice Cream was nerdy week, I had the idea of recreating a weird flavour from the wizarding world, but there aren’t really any. I haven’t yet figured out how to get ice cream to not melt, and everything else was very normal. The weirdest it got was strawberry and peanut butter, not two flavours I’ve ever thought of putting together personally although thinking about it, it’s the same as a PB&J sandwich. Strawberry and peanut butter has the bonus of being basically an ice cream I already know how to make - strawberry was actually the second Gunter’...