Week Forty-Two: Orchard

This week excited me, both because I generally love orchards and fruit picking, and because the theme of orchard is semi related to what I’ve been up to for the last few months.

I said back in Oceania week that I was considering where the future of my ice cream making was going. I’ve learned a lot about both ice cream and myself, and how I enjoy ice cream. When I look at the themes I’ve most enjoyed, they’ve been the ones that had me working with the natural environment around me, like when I went foraging for blackberries, used the local honey and incorporated flowers that were in bloom into my ice cream. I decided a while ago that I wanted my ice cream to become a celebration of local, seasonal and homegrown produce; I also wanted to expand the influence of food history in my ice cream, and they tie in well together because until the wider use of food preservation techniques all food was local and seasonal. To that end, I’ve spent a while gathering some heritage plants for my garden, to better emulate the sort of fruits, vegetables and flowers that the Gunters confectioners might have used. I have roses, lavender, sweet violets, apples, pears and cherries already, with strawberries on order and a few others planned such as tomatoes and chillies and next year pumpkins (too late for this year.) I’ve been sourcing local suppliers of ice cream staples like cream and sugar and eggs, which I’m still putting the finishing touches on but I’m 90% there. I don’t want to completely cut out the more exotic flavours like chocolate and vanilla, and nor did the Gunters confectioners, so I’m also working on finding close to source ways to get these ingredients because they’ll never be local to me. Lastly, I’m working on how to bring the new ice cream plan to everyone, and that is very close indeed and I’m very excited to share that in the next few weeks.

But for today, enjoy baked apple ice cream.

Baked apple ice cream

Ingredients for baked apples

4 apples such as Golden Delicious
90g dark brown sugar
10g ground cinnamon
25g unsalted butter 

Method for baked apples

I just used the recipe and instructions here with the weights above being what the volume based measurements came out for me; I might suggest use half the cinnamon but as we know I’m not a fan of cinnamon so I naturally would favour less of it.

There is a trick to getting the baked apples out of the dish using two dessert spoons, I’ve got a video of it here on my Instagram. Once cool, blend or otherwise crush the baked apples and pass it through a sieve to get a fine purée.

Ingredients and method for baked apple ice cream

This is my fruit ice cream using the baked apple purée as the fruit component.

I couldn’t get any of my photos to attach, so here they all are, plus the video of getting the baked apples out of the dish: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBXQWYnqXq0/?igsh=MTd5bjY0bDVlNHhlMg==

There wasn’t really a way for this one to fail - tried and tested recipe with a delicious flavour. As I said, I would use less cinnamon in future but that’s a preference, it’s just not a flavour I like too much. I was worried the butter would increase the fat to an unpleasant level but it didn’t, or that with more fat there would be too high a solid amount and therefore hard ice cream, but I think the sugar in the baked apples offset that too. I did debate whether to shift the amount of sugar I added at the ice cream stage because of the baked apple sugar but decided not to and I think that was the right decision. Overall, a really good ice cream. 


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