The Pineapple Encore

This ice cream was mainly inspired by the bottle of saffron I have that I am almost certainly never going to use in anything ever again. I bought it for  Africa week  and I’ve heard it said that saffron is a sweet and almost floral taste, but I couldn’t really pick that up amongst the other flavours of tagine inspired ice cream, so this week I decided to use only saffron.  Saffron ice cream Ingredients I made 700g, mostly because I was concerned about how much saffron I had, but the percentages can make any amount. 385g single (19% butterfat) cream (55%) 175g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (25%) 140g caster sugar (20%) Saffron threads - I used roughly 15 (they’re fiddly to count exactly!) per 100g of mixture, but this easily varies according to your taste. Method 1. Put all ingredients into a saucepan and whisk together; you don’t need to boil it, it’s just to encourage the flavour out of the saffron 2. Leave mixture to chill for several hours, preferably overnight; for b...

My most requested ice cream is mint ice cream. I’d barely got my first ice cream machine and people were asking for mint ice cream. No one requests  chestnut ice cream  or  brown bread ice cream , it’s always, “When are you making mint? Mint choc chip?” I have made it with mint extract but as readers here will know, I like using fresh ingredients not extracts so these were just made to satisfy people’s requests but didn’t really fit in with my ice cream portfolio (which isn’t to say they weren’t nice, though.) Herbal week was made for mint ice cream. The problem with mint is, we are used to peppermint. I did purchase some peppermint plants ages ago but they sadly succumbed to my usual black thumb - in my defence they arrived a week earlier than they were expected to, whilst I was away from home, and so they were stuck in the box for several days. Some cuttings from the original plants look promising but not in the short term. So I ordered mint from the supermarket and got...

I’m not much of a vegetable person, at least not in the classic sense. I love pulses and legumes and they form the core of my diet, but a vegetable you might think of as in ‘meat and two veg’ (in the food sense not the euphemistic sense) not so much. So thinking of what to do for vegetable week was difficult. I settled on pumpkin for two reasons: one, it’s one of the less objectionable vegetables to me and two, although the mini heatwave where I am right now doesn’t let on, we are fast heading towards autumn/fall. I once remarked that a particular ice cream wasn’t a summer ice cream, and my friend said, “It’s ice cream, all ice creams are summer ice creams, summer is their prime time!” I disagree, some flavours are almost warming and as we look towards the end of summer on the horizon I wanted to start getting some seasonal flavours in mind. Pumpkin could form a base for that, if it’s any good. Pumpkins have an interesting history. They’re a new world vegetable, amongst the earliest on...

But … but … this should be week thirty-two!  Yes, it should be, but my week went unexpectedly crazy and the days I typically use for making this week’s ice cream were needed for other tasks instead. Week thirty-two is coming, it was churned this morning and will be frozen overnight and tested tomorrow, but in the meantime have week thirty-one point five, more floral.  Remember I said I wanted to make rose ice cream? My friend with the roses had her garden party and so I was given the roses. I had five roses, and coincidentally I had a 300ml pot of single cream which meant I could make 500g of mixture. It’s the  same recipe as the lavender ice cream  but substituting the lavender with one rose per 100g of mixture, and instead of pressing into the sugar I put the cream and rose petals into a blender to get the flavour out before adding the rose blended cream to the saucepan with the egg yolks and sugar to make the custard.  This is personally my favourite ice crea...

I loved this week. I had so many ideas for it, hampered only by my lack of access to flowers. I’m not traditionally a gardener, in fact I have a bit of a reputation as a black thumb - plants under my care don’t often thrive. I bought a house a few years ago and it does have a garden, but there’s nothing much in it except for grass and I pay a gardener to mow that. However, and inspired by my ice cream journey, I’ve got plans to change this. I’ve actually bought and planted a rose, but it’s not like plants produce flowers instantly but hey, it isn’t dead yet! But that was rose ice cream out for this year, my friend did promise me her ones but wanted to keep them on the plant for a party which isn’t until next week.  So then I thought, lavender. I did buy some lavender plants, but they’re a particular variety (because I wanted a heritage variety) and I was going to collect them when I ended up slicing my foot open on broken glass. Instead of collecting lavender plants, they’re being ...