Ice Cream of the Week #1

Now, as you may be aware, when I go down to the West Country once a year or so, I tend to base my day trips around where I can get a decent ice cream. Last month's trip was no exception to this. In fact, I came home dying to get my ice cream maker out again and churn up a few flavours of my own.

My Ma bought me "Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home" by Jeni Britton Bauer (owner of a chain of eponymous ice cream parlours all over Ohio, USA) for my birthday a couple of years ago, and, although I OOOooooOOed at all the scrummo flavours in it at the time, I never actually got around to making any. So, first up from Jeni's book: Sweetcorn and Black Raspberry.

Straight up, I've never seen a black raspberry, so I followed Jeni's advice and used half red raspberries and half blackberries. Other than that, I pretty much followed the recipe to the letter, bar actually leaving a few whole sweetcorn kernels in the mix.

Basically, you mix up the ice cream base, and as the cream/milk is heating, you add the sweetcorn kernels to infuse in the warmth, straining them off again once the whole mixture is cool. Once churned, you layer the ice cream up with a simple coulis made from the raspberries and blackberries and sugar, and freeze for a couple o'hours. 

Et voila:

Blummin' delish. Now, the idea of sweetcorn ice cream may sound bizarre, but it really, really works. It doesn't seem savoury at all, which, given the natural sugars in sweetcorn, and that its ACTUAL NAME CONTAINS THE WORD "SWEET" IN IT, isn't really surprising.

Tasty as it was, I'm not 100% happy with the basic ice cream base Jeni uses. Whenever I've made ice cream in the past, I've always used this recipe by Nigel Slater, which is egg based. Jeni's is egg-free, using cream cheese for the protein element, along with corn syrup (golden syrup) and corn flour. It tastes pretty good, but takes forever to freeze/churn in the maker and gives more of a frozen yoghurt type of texture when fully frozen.

I shall persevere!