The Pineapple Encore

This was the hardest of these time period themes, for me. It’s not old enough to be interesting from a historical perspective, I’m not old enough to remember it and bring some of  my actual life experiences  to it; it was just a bit in the middle for me. I’ve touched upon  the 50s  before, and regular readers will know my entire ice cream premise is historical recipes, but by the 60s and 70s the recipes are recognisable as modern ones. So I settled for asking people who had been around then for ideas, and one of my friends said, “I wonder if you could do something with Angel Delight?” which is basically a flavoured powder you add to milk to thicken it and it turns into a mousse like pudding. So today, on ‘will it ice cream’, we have Angel Delight ice cream. Angel Delight ice cream Ingredients 2 packs of Angel Delight mix, in your preferred flavour (I used butterscotch) 600ml single (19% butterfat) cream 50g liquid glucose (I was concerned there isn’t enough sugar in ...

I’ve never said how old I am, and I’m still not going to say exactly but I am a nineties kid. However, my memory for things in my childhood isn’t great (not because anything bad happened, I hasten to add! A lot of things just didn’t seem to register in my memory for some reason) and when those lists of ‘you’re a nineties kid if you remember these things’ go around, I very often remember none of them. I once joked with a friend that the TV show 3rd Rock From The Sun resonated with me, because it’s like I appeared on the planet with just enough memories to know I was around in the nineties but maybe my memory implanters didn’t realise they should be including TV programmes and popular toys?  One of the few things I do remember are Frijj milkshakes. I can remember chocolate, strawberry and banana - the internet says there are more flavours now, but those are the three I remember. I don’t remember ever actually having one. My mum was well meaning, if I’d expressed an interest in having...

I hate salted caramel. I’m extremely sensitive to the taste of salt, to the extent that I usually just leave it out of things I’m cooking - I have very small hands and even I can’t get a pinch of salt small enough for me to not taste it and think that food is salty. So when all caramel seemed to turn to salted caramel practically overnight in the mid 2000s, that wasn’t the best move for my tastes.  Salted caramel ice cream Ingredients This is at heart a vanilla custard base ice cream. I use a lot of vanilla, that’s because I’m still basing these recipes on Gunters recipes and they used a lot of vanilla. I made 800g of mixture. 480g single (19% butterfat) cream (60%) 40g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (5%) 8 egg yolks (15%, or 1 egg yolk per 100g of mixture being made) 160g caster sugar (20%) [4 vanilla pods (1 vanilla pod per 200g of mixture being made)] Salted caramel sauce - I bought a 200g jar and used it all, and yes I used a pre-made sauce because I’m an ice cream maker not a ...

The original title of this was “A return to week twenty-six” but the theme of this week actually suited just as well. In week twenty-six,  foraged week , I said there are exactly two things I know how to safely forage and neither of them were seasonally available at the time (and then went on to have the carrageen moss disaster, but the less said about that the better)? Well, blackberry season is here… I spent a bit of my childhood being raised by my grandmother, who was a wonderful person who didn’t really get how the world works. She didn’t realise I was old enough to be in school; instead of being in school she taught me her own wisdom, so I became a child who could identify pretty much any woodland tree and who knew a lot of different embroidery stitches, but who had no idea how to play playground games with other children. I didn’t get on well with other children, but I could make a mean sampler. Blackberry picking was one of the joys of late summer and autumn, we’d gather the...