Blowing Hot and Cold

Hot, cold, Sunny, cloudy. You never know what it's going to be. The weather in Sydney has been as indecisive as a temperamental bride-to-be umm-ing and ahh-ing her way through everything. I don't think I have seen the weather this ambivalent until of late; moody, yes; merciless, yes, but this ambiguous, no. You never know what's coming your way, and I've given up trusting the weather people, they seem to get it wrong most of time.

With the weather being so volatile, I thought I would beat mother nature to the punch and just put away something sweet and icy for when a hot summer's day would come. If we were going to get one, that is. I found that making a batch of ice cream on a cloudy day, is the perfect nest egg for future hot days.

And well what do you know, summer does eventually decide to show up and in true Sydney fashion, it showed up in such a way that you will want to jump out of your skin, or at least straight into a cold pool of water. Woe to all those who don't have air-conditioning, or aren't in near proximity to a body of water.

Being the environmentally-conscious greenies that we are, were a little stingy with the air-conditioning and try not use it unnecessarily and like to leave it up to mother nature to provide the cool breeze. Although when Sydney summer is at its peak, you can forget the breeze; you can also forget the words balmy and tropical, it's more like stifling and blistering and not to mention the muggy nights. There's just no relief. By this time there is absolutely no hesitation in grabbing the remote and turning on the cool air. I'm trying to remember why I love summer again.

Ahh yes, there is this one thing, besides the beach of course- it's Ice Cream! I hate to say it but let's just do a united shout out and hi-five for ice cream. Whoever decided to put some cream and eggs together and said let's churn this baby till it gets thick and freeze it is a godsend. In my opinion, nothing makes children and adults alike as happy as ice cream does.

This ice cream not only took the edge off during the hot days but it also comes as an extremely tardy recipe for the guys at Harden Honey. I had promised them some recipes on the supply that they had generously given me months ago but never got around to making something decent and worthy of their honey. So here it is, finally, a gorgeously smooth Honey Lavender Ice Cream.

Using honey instead of sugar is great of you are thinking about minimising refined sugars in your diet, honey is not only a natural sweetener and is full of antioxidants. It also adds a nice floral accents to the ice cream, more so than ordinary sugar would. I would recommend using a mild honey for this ice cream as a stronger, richer honey would drown out the subtlety of the lavender.

And to add to the fanfare, I made these cute ice cream cups made of wonton wrappers. It's a great alternative to waffle cones, especially when you don't have one of those nifty waffle cone presses.

Honey Lavender Ice Cream
Recipe from epicurious.com
Makes about 1-litre



2 cups heavy cream
1 cup full cream milk
2/3 cup mild honey
2 tbsp dried edible lavender flowers
2 large eggs
1/8 tsp salt

Bring cream, milk, honey, and lavender just to a boil in a 2-quart heavy saucepan over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, then remove pan from heat.
Let steep, covered, 30 minutes.
Pour cream mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl and discard lavender.
Return mixture to cleaned saucepan and heat over moderate heat until hot.

Whisk together eggs and salt in a large bowl, then add 1 cup hot cream mixture in a slow stream, whisking.
Pour into remaining hot cream mixture in saucepan and cook over moderately low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until thick enough to coat back of spoon and registers 75 to 80°C on a thermometer, about 5 minutes (do not let boil).

Pour custard through sieve into cleaned bowl and cool completely, stirring occasionally. Chill, covered, until cold, at least 3 hours.
Churn custard in ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions.
Transfer ice cream to an airtight container and put in freezer to harden.

Crispy Ice-Cream Cups
recipe from Donna Hay Magazine Issue 36

1-pack wonton wrappers*
40g unsalted butter, melted
icing (confectioner's) sugar, for dusting

Preheat oven to 200°C.
Brush wonton wrappers with melted butter.
Press wrappers into a 12-hole muffin tray. (Depending on the size of the wonton wrappers you have bought you may have to use more than one wrapper. If you are using more than one, brush between each layer.)
Bake for 5-6 minutes or until golden and crispy.
Turn out into a wire rack and cool.
Dust with icing sugar.
Scoop ice cream into the cups and serve immediately.

Eat, Drink and be Berry

January is here again, and the season of expanding waistlines is slowly winding up; it looks like gym memberships and low-fat yoghurt are back on the list of things hip and happening and pork and anything that ends with the word pudding are back the list of all things dreaded and uncool. Only during the festive season is it okay to reach for your third or possibly even fourth helping of Christmas ham (with extra glaze), and everyone knows when you have multiple festivities to attend the food tally always reverts back to zero at the start of every function.

Is it just me or does the capacity of one's belly tend to expand with each Christmas? I know now that I have had 26 years practice in eating to surfeit, and my belly can hold surprisingly more than I can fathom to eat. You should have seen the meagre amount of gingerbread men I could eat in the past, now I can practically down a whole tribe of them and their m&m covered house without even batting an eyelid. Luckily, the genetic lottery has supplied me with a quick metabolism that hopefully won't go south with age.

But just before you go back into that regime of pristine of fitness and health and while were still hanging on to our seemingly rapid metabolic rate, here is one more fat-laden dessert for the road- a Berry Semifreddo that is a nice balance between the good and the bad. Good = berries. Bad = Cream.

If you are teetering on the fine edge between saying no to desserts and all things sweet as your resolution this year, then perhaps consider this semifreddo as the last thing to tide you over until the next sugar binge. The dessert isn't overly cloying and the great thing is that all the ingredients are natural. If you are at all worried about all that cream then this dessert is probably not for you. Just think, all that cream aside, there are eggs and berries, both I imagine would have that giant red tick from the Heart Foundation. So what's to worry about?

Besides, with all the whisking involved in this dessert, half of what your eating is probably just air. And if you are still really worried abut all that cream, then the best thing to do is to invite ten of your closest friends and get them to help you eat all that extra dessert. What are your friends there for but to share the calories with?

What's great about most iced confections that contain cream, like ice cream, is that you really don't need to eat that much to feel full. Two modest scoops and you have had your fill. Not that this dessert isn't good enough for seconds but when you are curbing the expansion of that waistline, two scoops are perfect for drawing the line.

As you can see, I am still enjoying the bumper crop of berries available in the markets. Some berries have a markedly short season here so I like to get them as soon as they appear in stores before they disappear again. For this recipe I used blueberries and raspberries, although you could probably substitute any other type of berry that is is in season- strawberries which can be easily found are a good alternative, as would be mulberries and blackberries and redcurrants if you can get them.

The great thing about this dessert is that it not only tastes delicious but it looks a treat once you start to scoop into it. The berries tend to sink to the bottom as you freeze them, so when they emerge from the freezer it really doesn't look like much much, but when you dig in you will be pleasantly surprised by a deluge or colour.

Right now the weather has been surprisingly genial, considering the weather people had tipped an overcast and wet summer. So what better way to take advantage of the sunny days than with a dessert to beat the heat.

Berry Semifreddo
Adapted From Donna Hay Magazine, Issue 36
Serves 10



2 x 120g punnets blueberries
1 x 120g punnet raspberries
3 eggs
2 egg yolks, extra
1 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped
1 cup caster sugar
1¾ pure single (pouring) cream

Place blueberries in the bowl of a food processor and process until smooth.
Pour into a small bowl and set aside.
Clean out food processor bowl and process the raspberries and place in another bowl and set aside.
Place eggs, egg yolks, vanilla seeds and sugar in a large heatproof bowl.
Place over a saucepan of simmering water and whisk the mixture with a hand-held beater for 4-5 minutes or until thick and pale.
Remove from heat and continue to whisk until the mixture is room temperature.
In a separate bowl, whisk cream until soft peaks form and gently fold into the egg mixture.
Fold in the berries until evenly incorporated throughout the mixture.
Pour the mixture into a 12-cup capacity dish and cover with aluminium foil.
Place in the freezer for 4-6 hours until set.
Serve with strawberries on top.

Let Them Eat Ice Cream Cake?

My first experience with ice cream cake was when I was at a birthday party; I must have been around 5 or 6 years old. And since then I never really gave ice creams cakes anymore thought. To me they are just part of those juvenile whims that you try to shed once you reach a certain age along with say, wetting your bed and running barefoot around the neighbourhood in your PJs. Okay, so it might be a bit of a stretch to mention ice cream cake in the same sentence as wetting your bed, but you get what I mean.

So you might be glad to know that I’m way past those childhood dilemmas but I think that it’s time to resurrect the ice cream cake. I’ve only ever seen the ice cream cake come out for two types of birthday parties- they are usually reserved for children’s birthdays and for those over the age of 60. Is it because we revert back to that child-like state when we get older and thus requires the presence of an ice cream cake? Well, I say enough of having it merely at the polar end of our life. Why not have it in the birthdays in between childhood and, well the other end.

And since I needed a birthday excuse to make an ice cream cake, it was perfect timing that this weekend is G’s birthday. I won’t tell you how old he is, but let me say, we won’t be putting any candles on the cake. And so, with the making of this cake returned my affections for the long forgotten ice cream cake. I don’t know why I never caught hold of its appeal past childhood; I mean ice cream that you can slice into? It’s novelty at it’s best. And I’m all for that.

The cake is the perfect merging of two extremely enjoyable things- cake and ice cream. What’s even better is that you can be as creative as you can with the flavours, the layering and the ingredients. This particular one is a Banana and Date Ice Cream Cake. The dates are first soaked in Marsala and when you come across them in the cake they become gooey bursts of sweetness. The marsala adds a nice depth to the dates which I really love, but if you are serving this to children then you can certainly leave it out.

It not only happened that it was G’s birthday weekend, but this month’s Monthly Mingle is all about ice cream. While people in the northern half of the globe are sweating away in their own seasonal sauna, we down here are freezing. Two of our heaters broke so our house has become a refrigerator and I have been baking to compensate for the seemingly lack of heat in our house. Also, it appears that the only functioning heater in the house only heats up to a radius of two feet around and it seems like the dog has already laid claim to that one.

So you can see why I wasn’t really the disposition to make my own ice cream, so I opted to cheat and buy some from the shop. I know what you’re probably thinking, shock, horror, she bought the ice cream? Didn’t the theme require “your best ice cream creation”? Well the ice cream may not be homemade but the cake definitely is. And if it’s any consolation I did make the sponge cake from scratch myself in the hope that the entire cake didn’t seem like one half-assed effort at making ice cream cake. Hopefully this submission still qualifies for this month’s mingle. My laziness aside, this recipe is a winner.

I remember having dates with vanilla ice cream when I dined at Tetsuya’s last year and that combination was superb, so adding banana into the mix made it triple threat. And the dusting of cocoa powder at end makes every layer of the cake one to remember. No matter what, in each spoonful there are at least two or three different flavours, but the great thing is that it doesn’t attack your palate. The tastes integrate seemingly well together and I guess that is what ice cream flavours do. Just think rum and raisin, choc hazelnut, rocky road, individual ingredients that create a flavour of their very own.

So I hope you give this recipe a try, and make sure you mosey on down to Meeta’s blog to see the final round up of icy treats for July’s Monthly Mingle.

Banana and Date Ice Cream Cake
adapted from the Australian Good Taste Magazine (Oct 2004)
serves 8

2 large ripe bananas, sliced into discs 1.5 cm thick
vanilla sponge cake (recipe below)
10 fresh dates, pitted and coarsely chopped
2 tbsp Marsala
1 litre vanilla ice cream, softened slightly
3 tbsp cocoa powder

Combine chopped dates and Marsala in a bowl and allow to macerate for 20 minutes, until the dates have soaked up all of the Marsala.
In a large bowl, combine the ice cream and dates and stir.
Spoon a thin layer of ice cream mixture onto the cooled sponge, evening out with the back of a spoon.
Line with the bananas, cut side up until the whole tin is covered.
Spoon the remaining ice cream, mixture over the bananas and smooth the surface.
Tap the tin onto the work bench a couple of times for trapped air bubbles to escape.
Fold over the excess parchment paper on each side to over the ice cream.
Place in the freezer for 8 hours or overnight to firm up.
When firm, peel off the parchment paper and use it to lift the cake out of the tin.
Transfer to a serving platter.
Dust with cocoa powder to cover the top.
Cut into slices and serve.

Vanilla Sponge Cake (Base)
*this batter makes a little bit more than required for the ice cream cake. You can choose to store the left-over batter overnight or alternatively bake the remainder in a smaller mould and make a smaller cake our of that.

¼ cup plain all-purpose flour, sifted
¼ cup cornflour (cornstarch), sifted
2 large eggs, separated
1 tsp vanilla extract
a pinch of cream of tartar
¼ cup, plus 2 tbsp caster sugar

Preheat oven to 180°C.
Line a 22cm loaf tin with parchment paper and have a 5cm overhang on each side
In a small bowl, sift together the flour and corn flour, set aside.
In a large bowl, beat egg yolks, half of the sugar and vanilla until the mixture becomes thick and pale.
In another bowl, whisk egg whites and cream of tartar together until soft peaks form. Gradually add the remaining sugar and whisk until whites are stiff and glossy.
Using a wide metal spoon, fold the egg white mixture into the egg yolk mixture.
Then, in three additions fold in the flour just until the flour is incorporated into the wet mixture.
Transfer the batter into the prepared tin to just fill 1.5cm of the way up. Smooth the top with a spatula.
Bake for about 20 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean when inserted.
Let stand in the tin until it is time to make ice cream cake.

Goodbye Summer: Fluking Ice Cream

Officially, there are only 4 days of summer remaining, although our summers do like to linger behind weeks after we’ve bade her farewell. What can I say, she likes it here in Sydney and how could you not, we welcome her with open arms, plead with her not to leave come February and yearn for her return mid August.

Sydney I think, is at its best in summer, some may argue that it is spring when she is her prettiest and this may be true, but all we are, are merely waking up from the slumber of humdrum winter days. Sydney is most alive in the summertime, when the sun is out, the humidity is at its peak and flies are doing their best to cling to you.

Yes, nothing beats a hot, fly-infested summer. I think the locals have become accustomed to this nuisance come summer, although the visitors have a hard time coping with it. A friend studying here from Africa is convinced she is under attack, although they never seem to bother me anymore, but enough about flies.

So now that we are counting down, numbering the precious days we have left of genial weather and resplendently abundant sunshine, I must turn to the fact that I have only blogged about ice all but once this entire season. I have been making use of the ice cream machine that came into my possession over the Christmas period, although most excursions have been undocumented. Undocumented in the fact that they have, well, not quite up to the standard that I like to regale my readers.

The ice creams in question were so disastrous that my freezer for some time had become a morgue for deceased ice cream. It became the case where creative inspiration, alas did not meet with successful realisation. The only realisation that took place was the realisation that my ice creams sucked. They actually didn’t suck that much at the time of conception, sure the concept was great, although something must have gone awry in the process of execution that I somehow gave birth to a mass of icy abominations.

Perhaps I should just stick to more familiar flavours, like run and raisin, rocky road, even vanilla. At least success would have come more easily. Luckily after the third disaster, I decided to stick to combinations I knew were tried and tested and not even I, the fumbling ice cream maker could not stuff up. After the many misappropriations of cream, milk and eggs, I eventually managed to churn out something worthy of this blog. I wasn’t going to lower the bar for those other things that even my dog wouldn’t eat.

Let’s just say that clementine and champagne ice cream sounded like a great idea on paper. But, in actual fact, it tasted worse than that cherry flavoured cough syrup that your mother used to force feed you as a child, as you writhed in discontent as it unwillingly made its way down your throat. Feeling a like a complete loser, here I present to you my two best creations: Coffee and Hazelnut Ice Cream and Honey Ginger Gelato.

The coffee ice cream is made with hazelnut flavoured coffee so the hints of hazelnut are quite subtle. Although if you are more inclined to use ground hazelnut, go for it. I wasn’t too sure about what this would do to the texture of the ice cream, and given my track record, I decided to go for something a lot simpler, the fewer ingredients the better.

The gelato, was little bit more of a gamble, I had never used honey in an ice cream before, and was scared about what this would do to the taste. But it’s a wonder what the combination of milk, eggs, honey and ginger can do, as by the end it looked like what gelato shoudl look like and, unlike previous attempts, it actually seemed edible! In fact at first I wasn’t too keen on the honey ginger combination, which surprised me as I love it cakes and biscuits, but somehow it didn’t taste quite right to me. However my family loved it, so I guess it wasn’t a complete failure.

So give these recipes a go, but I cannot sure you that they will turn out successfully. Who knows these could have been a fluke.

Coffee Hazelnut Ice Cream

100g sugar
4 egg yolks
400ml full cream milk
1 tbsp hazelnut flavoured coffee ground
500ml pure cream (35%-55% milkfat)

In a large bowl, beat the sugar and egg yolk together until think and pale.
Place milk and coffee in a medium heavy based saucepan over low heat and bring the milk just to a gentle simmer.
Remove from heat and strain the milk using a fine sieve.
Gradually pour the strained milk into the egg and sugar mixture, whisking slowly as you go.
Place the bowl over a pan of simmering water and whisk the custard until it thickens. (If you have a thermometer, the custard should be at about 60°C.)
Remove custard from heat and pass through a fine sieve again to remove any clumps that may have formed. Place in the refrigerator to chill for 1-2 hours.
Using a whisk, incorporate cream into the custard*.
Pour the mixture into an ice cream machine and churn according to manufacturer’s instructions**.
When churned, transfer ice cream to a 1.2-litre air tight container and place in the freezer.
The ice cream should be ready to serve after 1-2 hours.

*Ensure that you do not add the cream to a warm custard.
** Under no circumstances should you place warm custard into an ice cream machine, unless you want to destroy it.

Honey and Ginger Gelato

800ml full cream milk
7 egg yolks
100g honey
1 small knob of fresh ginger, sliced (for infusing)
1 tsp ginger ground

In a large saucepan set over a pan of simmering water, whisk milk and egg yolks together.Add the honey , ginger slices and ginger ground and continuously whisk until honey has dissolved and the mixture has thickened. This will take about 20 minutes and the custard should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.Remove the custard from the heat and remove ginger slices.
Allow the custard to chill in the refrigerator.When the custard has completely chilled, pour into an ice cream machine and churn according to manufacturer’s instructions.Store the ice cream in a 1-litre air tight container and freeze.The gelato should be ready to srve after freezing for 1-2 hours.

All I want for Christmas...

On my Christmas wish-list is an ice cream maker. It was on the birthday wish-list too, although somehow I don’t think the message was quite heard. Maybe I didn’t give it enough emphasis, but I did manage to get most things I wanted including a Mimco bag that I had been coveting for so long. But perhaps if I blog about my desire for an ice maker, this somehow makes it official. So Santa if you are reading this, please note that I don’t want my two front teeth or two turtle doves, just one shiny new ice cream maker to make those sweltering summer days less disagreeable.

With summer well and truly on her way, and with the temperature set to sizzle even the most heat-resistant, happy-to-bake-in-the-sun type of individuals, having an ice maker in my possession will most certainly be a blessing. And not only for me, but for those fortunate souls that will get to share in the benefits of an ice cream maker. Those that will get to bask in the mutual benefits of me having an ice cream maker should carefully consider their Christmas shopping list before hastily buying me the first scented candle they see in the mall. Not that I have anything against the scented candle, although any more would turn my house into a potential matchstick.

Sydney summers have been known to climb past the 45°C mark, and everyone remembers that ghastly New Years day that probably caused spontaneous combustion statistics to triple. What good was a pool then? It either became too crowded with every man, woman, cat and dog eager to take a dip, causing the pool to turn into a giant pee-infested hot tub, or the heat would cause the chlorine to rise to the top and create a sordid looking dark film over the surface of the water. I’m telling you, what good is a pool then? This is where ice cream becomes your best friend.

Because I have yet to acquire myself an ice cream maker to call my own, I opted to make something not too far off- semifreddo. Semifreddo, which is Italian for “half-cold” refers mostly to a dessert that somewhat resembles a frozen mousse. Its texture is less velvety than that of ice cream although it still melts in your mouth in the most glorious fashion. It’s a great little number, but I confess can be quite a pain to make in comparison to ice cream as that all the “churning” is done by you and not by the ice cream maker. There is also quite a bit of washing involved after as that you need to beat the ingredients in separate bowls.

This semifreddo was a three bowl operation, as opposed to ice cream which would have been a one bowl operation. So for some, the washing factor may be turn off but there are fewer margins for error with semifreddo than with ice cream. Ice cream requires you to make a crème aglaise, that if left unattended and un-whisked for even a second could turn into the thickest lot of scrambled eggs you have ever made. With semifreddo, the eggs and sugar are cooked over a double broiler only until the mixture turns pale, so it is less tiresome with the whisking and less precarious with the cooking time compared to ice cream. How fluffy your semifreddo becomes all depends on you, as you determine how much air you can physically beat into that bowl of cream and eggs. Just don’t get too enthusiastic and beat your cream into butter, which is far from impossible if you are using an electric mixer.

This Triple Chocolate Semifreddo contains dark, milk and white chocolate, hence the “triple” in the title. The dark chocolate makes up the semifreddo base and milk and while chocolate chunks are added to the mixture. When frozen, the chunks of milk and white chocolate are like little explosions of flavour and texture in every mouthful. After a taste of the finished semifreddo, you start to think that the three-bowl thing isn’t too bad at all. When all the washing is over and done with and it is just the eating that’s ahead of you, you forget about all the time it took to beat in all that air yourself. It’s goodness that you can taste and it’s goodness that’s well-earned and that you can't beat.

Although I still think an ice cream maker would be nice to have.

Triple Chocolate Semifreddo
taken from this book

250g dark chocolate (70% cacao)
3 eggs
2 egg yolks, extra
½ cup caster sugar
1¾ cups single or pouring cream (35-40% milk fat)
½ cup milk chocolate, chopped
½ cup white chocolate, chopped

Place the dark chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and stir until melted, set aside.
Place the eggs, egg yolks, and sugar in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and whisk for 4-5 minutes or until the mixture is pale and the sugar has dissolved.
Remove from heat and beat with an electric mixer for 5-6 minutes or until the mixture has cooled to room temperature.
Using a wide metal spoon, fold through the melted chocolate until well incorporated with the egg mixture and has taken on the colour of the chocolate.
In another large bowl, place the cream and beat with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Be careful not to seize your cream.
Fold the egg and chocolate mixture through the cream and add the chopped milk and white chocolate. Mix until fully incorporated.
Pour the mixture into a metal cake tin or glass overproof dish, cover and freeze for 4-6 hours until firm.
To serve, place scoops of semifreddo into chilled bowls or glasses.

Serendipity Ice Cream Class: Part II

All hands on deck

Eighteen strangers arrived at Serendipity's Marickville factory on a crisp Wednesday evening with eager anticipation and probably a certain amount of trepidation as to what delights or possibly horrors were in store for them that night. Thankfully, within the first 5 minutes of the class, owner Sarah Mandelson had already managed to capture the attention of her class regaling us with amusing anecdotes and enthusing about her love for ice cream. You could tell that ice cream is her passion and she and husband Richard have really staked their reputation on making some of the finest and most luxurious ice cream in Sydney.

The first portion of the class was a basic introduction to her and a short history on how Serendipity Ice Cream came about; which was actually borne more out of necessity than pure chance. Her mother Alix Mandelson, who was an American married to an Australian, missed all the “wacky” American ice cream flavours like Run and Raisin and Rocky Road that were not available here in Sydney during the 60’s. So she found Serendipity Ice cream; and back then Alix would make all the ice cream for the shop using her manual self-churn ice cream maker, an austere contraption that looked a lot like a bucket with a wheel attached to churn the cream while it was submerged in some ice. Now that’s a lot of elbow grease! Ice cream is most certainly in Sarah’s blood, as her mother was not only heavily pregnant while (self)-churning her first batch of Serendipity ice cream but she was actually in labour with Sarah.

The ice cream being made for the class was a Wattleseed and Grand Marnier Ice Cream. You start off with a crème anglaise consisting of cream (35%-40% fat content), milk (full cream or 4% fat) and egg yolks (free-range). This mixture needs to be stirred over a double broiler continuously. Once you have started this process you shouldn't leave the stove, as Sarah emphasises the minute you leave the stove is the instant the crème anglaise will decide to turn into scrambled eggs.

While stirring the crème anglaise, you can now add your sugar; you can also use honey, golden syrup, maple syrup or glucose, whatever you like. Also other flavours you would like to infuse your ice cream with can also be added now, especially things such as herbs, spices and coffee which need to be steeped to release their flavour. Just remember solids such as cinammon sticks and cloves will need to be strained before churning. Once the crème anglaise has thickened, which is after about 20 minutes of continuous stirring you now have your base for your ice cream.

Now it's time to add your flavourings- today we are using wattleseeds, orange zest, orange essential oil and Grand Marnier. Sarah mentions it is advisable to add several types of flavourings if your base flavour is not potent enough. For example, the orange zest would not have been sufficient to render our ice cream the orange flavour we desired, so to solve this, we added some orange oil and Grand Marnier to boost its overall orange flavour. For the purposes of the class and time restrictions we made a concentrated crème anglaise base and just added this to a large batch of plain crème anglaise that Sarah had made and chilled earlier. That is why the crème anglaise looks extremely dark here.

The next step, which is vital, is to chill your crème anglaise; as it is not advisable to pour your mixture into any type of ice cream machine while still warm. As Sarah recalls, this is how you would effectively destroy your ice cream machine and your crème anglaise. If this ever happens, you will need to start over. Seeing that for our class Sarah had already prepared a chilled batch of crème anglaise, all we had to do was pour in our concentrated wattleseed mixture into the prepared batch and take a short walk to Gina, their affectionately named ice cream machine.

Then you play the waiting game. Luckily for us, Gina is a commercial ice cream machine and can churn nearly 20 litres in less than a mere 10 minutes. After Gina spits out the churned ice cream into buckets we were then allowed to go for our life and fill our 1-litre containers. Sarah asserts that we all fill our containers to the brim as that pockets of air in the container will cause undesired ice crystals to form when frozen. We gladly took her advice and with even more enthusiam accepted the offer to make sure we licked our giant ice cream spatulas clean. They didn't call it hands on for nothing.

After you have placed your ice cream in its container you will have to chill it for some time until it is completely frozen. Depending on how efficient your freezer is, this could take an hour or so. We were lucky that Sarah packed our ice cream with some dry ice to continue the freezing process on the way home. Once the ice cream is frozen, the only step left is to devour it with as much gusto and appreciation that was excercised while making the ice cream.

These are some things I learned...
+ Sugar not only makes you ice cream taste better, but it also acts to depress the freezing point of your ice cream thus making for a softer product that is easier to eat. It is actually better to use natural sugars as opposed to artificial sweeteners when making ice cream as that the sugar helps to bind and create a smooth luscious texture to your ice cream.
+ When substituting sugars, replace it weight for weight as sugar volumes vary between different sweeteners. So substituting by weight is a safer bet.
+ Unless you are making gelato or sorbet (not ice cream), do not skimp on the cream or the amount of butterfat content, using more milk or water will cause your ice cream to be harder and not as velvety. They don’t call it ice cream for nothing.
+ Do not use too much alcohol in your ice cream, as that alcohol will cause the ice cream not to freeze at all, resulting in a gooey mush that evidently will not look or taste like ice cream. As a guideline, your ice cream should have no more than 2%-4% alcoholic volume. You can cook the alcohol off first if you want to use more for flavour.
+ Alcohol will actually give the ice cream a very cold “mouth feel”. But adding too much will result in a disaster.
+ When making a vanilla bean ice cream, rub the vanilla beans into the sugar to disperse the seeds and not form clumps.
+ Pieces of nuts should not be added to your crème anglaise. To get maximum flavour, roast them first, chop them and then mix through after churning.
+ Never under any circumstances add citrus juice (acids) to your crème anglaise unless you want to make yoghurt. For citrus flavours, use the zest or essential oils instead.
+ Fruits that have high water content may need to be cooked to a jam consistency before adding to your crème anglaise.
+ When it comes to ice cream, you are only limited by your imagination!

See Part I, with pictures of the the final product

Serendipity
333 Enmore Rd
Marickville NSW 2204
Phone: (02) 9557 8986

Check out the last of the round up for Good Food Month here.

Serendipity Ice Cream Class: Part I

[I apologise now for this rather verbose post, but when it comes to ice cream I just cannot be concise]

When one is presented with the opportunity to witness ice cream being made by one of the city’s leading artisans, one should not retreat into reticence but rather do everything in their power to get themselves to that class. Be it feigning illness to get out work commitments or even selling the proverbial kidney, do whatever needs to be done to get to there, especially when one claims to love ice cream almost as much as breathing itself.

Boy do I love ice cream.

Okay, perhaps my passion for ice cream really does not extend so far as to support those outlandish claims, but I cannot ignore the fact that I love ice cream. Even as a child I have vivid memories of how slowly and meticulously I would eat a scoop of ice cream, scooping, scraping and licking in a methodical and almost Zen-like fashion. So whatever it is I love about ice cream, it began at an early age and I am forever ruined for it. Nothing else can compare to a creamy scoop of velvety ice cream, or gelato, or sorbet or semi freddo. Anything frozen and scoop-able is encompassed in this affection.

So where does this lovesick introduction lead us? To the Serendipity “hands on” class being run during Good Food Month, that’s where!

Running the hands on class was Sarah Mandelson, who along with her husband is the owner at the helm of Serendipity. I was delighted to see that she was nowhere near the size of a house and thus proved to me that ice cream does not cause you to, let’s just say, “chubbify”.

A little bit of history. The company was started by Sarah’s mother Alix, who as an American living in Australia pined for the “wacky” American ice cream flavours that seemed to be absent in Australia. Apparently the only unconventional flavour Australia boasted back then was the humble Neapolitan, and unfortunately her mother was allergic to chocolate which left for an uninspired combination of strawberry and vanilla. So what this meant was that an alternative had to be birthed, and so came Serendipity.

The underlying mantra for Serendipity is to use all natural ingredients and to use the best, which means no skimping on the cream and to always use the freshest eggs. This I cannot agree with more and after tasting a scoop of Sarah’s ice cream, you will notice how lacking the conventional store-bought ice creams really are. She claims that for the money you would pay for a seemingly “premium” ice cream from the supermarket, there is probably more air churned into the mixture than ice cream itself. Serendipity can pride themselves on making “super premium” ice cream which refers to the fat content (at least 14%) in their ice cream. I know what you’re thinking, whoa mama that's a lot of fat! Although this may seem like a lot, one scoop of her rich and creamy ice cream is more than enough to satisfy. Her ice cream wasn’t designed to be eaten in bulk; it’s more of a luxury item than a cheap thrill.

Sarah’s teaching style is light-hearted and humorous, and her approach to making ice cream is simple and straightforward. She is not one for convoluted techniques and asserts that those long-winded steps are just being “too precious”. What she lacks in convolutions she makes up for creativity, and urges us that the flavour of ice cream is only limited by our imagination. For instance, she tells us of a Laksa ice cream her and her husband concocted for a recent festival in Chinatown. Probably one of the few ice creams to ever contain seafood products! I don't know if I would have fancied this flavour, but this is what she coins as, “intellectual ice cream”- ice cream that will make you think, but will not make you go for another scoop; as opposed to “emotional ice cream”- the kind that you always want more of despite better judgment (and your hips) telling you no.

The class cost me $40 for 1½ hours but to be honest, I felt like I got a lot for my money. When I left the Marickville factory, I came away with a handful of great ice cream recipes, a wealth of knowledge in making homemade ice cream from scratch, a truly enjoyable time, and a 1-litre tub of freshly made Wattleseed and Grand Marnier Ice Cream packed with my very own reserve of dry ice to keep my ice cream frozen throughout the trip home. All bases were covered and really, what more could you ask for?

Part II: an ice cream class pictorial

See more hands on experiences during Good Food Month at Rebecca Cucina.

Serendipity
333 Enmore Rd
Marickville NSW 2204
Phone: (02) 9557 8986