The Small Gardener

Raspberry Ripple Ice Cream Recipe

(Makes 1 Litre, approx.)

Raspberry Ripple Ice Cream with Meringue

Ingredients
300ml double cream
275ml semi skimmed milk
1 Vanilla Pod
80g Caster Sugar
4 Egg Yolks

400g raspberries
1 tablespoon Caster Sugar
3 tablespoons of water

• Put the milk and cream into a saucepan. Split the vanilla pod down the middle, slicing through only on side of the pod, open the pod out so you can scrape down the inside to get the seeds. They will clump together onto the knife in a black lump. Knock that into the saucepan with the milk, and put the cleaned out pod in there too.
• Heat the cream mixture gradually and bring to the boil. As soon as it's boiling take it off the heat and leave to one side for about 30 minutes so the vanilla can infuse into the liquid. Stir it every once in a while, while it's cooling down, to stop a skin forming. When the 30 minutes is up remove the vanilla pod. (You can rinse it off, dry it, and reuse it in another recipe if you wish.)
• In a seperate bowl, whisk the egg yolks and sugar until they are very light in colour.
• Put the cream mixture back onto the hob and heat up until it is not quite simmering. Then take off the heat and gradually pour it over the eggs and sugar in their bowl, whisking all the time to combine it.
• Pour the mixture back into the saucepan and heat on a low heat for about 15-20 minutes, until the custard thickens and covers the back of a spoon. Do Not Boil! When it gets to the thick custard stage put it into a bowl, or jug, and allow to cool. Stir every once in a while to stop a skin forming.
• To make the raspberry syrup, heat the raspberries, sugar and water in a saucepan. Bring to the boil and allow to simmer for 8-10 minutes until all the juice has been released from the berries. Pour the mixture through a sieve over a bowl, squashing the berries with the back of a spoon to get all the juice through the sieve. This will remove the pulp and seeds. Put the juice back into the saucepan and simmer until it thickens a bit more. I thickened mine to a thin syrup. Then put the syrup into a bowl and allow to cool.
• When the custard is cool, start the ice cream maker churning and slowly pour the mixture through the pouring hole in the ice cream maker's lid. Leave to churn for 30 minutes. It should look like soft scoop ice cream by then.
• Find a freezer tub that will hold approx 1 litre of ice cream. Layer a third of the ice cream over the bottom. Add half the raspberry syrup onto this, then the next third of the ice cream. Add the last of raspberry syrup, then the last of the ice cream on the very top.
• Get a knife and run it through the mixture a few times like you are cutting through the ice cream. This should give you the ripple effect.
• Freeze the ice cream for at least an hour.

Now the important info. Not the calories. Frankly if you are calorie counting, don't eat ice cream. This is only a treat ice cream, anyway, we're not going to have it every weekend. Besides, I've run out of free raspberries for the moment, so we'll have to find something else to go into it because the base ice cream could be used to add anything into. What I have worked out is the price it costs to make. 93p for the double cream, 23p for the milk, £1.49 for the vanilla pod, 14p for the sugar, 50p for the eggs (if you use the whites for meringue), and if you grow your own free raspberries, that comes to £3.31. You can get 6 portions out of it if you have a meringue with it too, so that works out at 55p. (The meringues are 5p each, so 60p all in for a meringue and ice cream dessert. Bargain.)

But, if that seems a bit steep, or, if you haven't got the raspberries, you could save money if you cut the amount of raspberry syrup by half. There is a lot of the syrup so it wouldn't affect the ice cream too much. (In fact you could use whatever weight of raspberries you have and just adjust the sugar and water to that weight.) You could also use 2 teaspoons of vanilla essence instead of a pod. That would bring the cost down to about £1.82, if your raspberries are your own. If you are buying 200g of raspberries, it would be £3.82.

If you look at Ben and Jerrys, or Hagen Daas, which is £4 - £4.50 for 500ml, the cost of this ice cream doesn't work out too bad. The quality of the ice cream is the same as that, I think. It's not a 99p for 2 litre job. It's proper ice cream. Creamy, fruity, vanilla'y, lovely.

Recipe for the meringues - this'll make about 16 small, or 12 larger, but you can freeze the extras.

The 4 left-over egg whites
8oz caster sugar

• Pre-heat the oven to 150 degrees.
• Whisk the egg whites with a hand whisk on a slow speed for about a minute. Increase to a medium speed and whisk for another two minutes. Finally turn the whisk to it's highest speed and whisk until you get stiff peaks. (which means you can lift the whisk beaters out of the egg whites and leave a tall peak behind in the mixture that doesn't collapse back down.)
• When you are at the stiff peak stage, gradually whisk in the sugar, one tablespoon at a time. Whisk each tablespoon so it's well combined and eventually you'll get a stiff, shiny mixture.
• Get a couple of baking sheets and put some baking parchment on them. *Tip of the day - To hold the parchment on the sheets you can dab a tiny bit of meringue mixture in each corner of the baking sheet and stick the parchment on top of it. It cleans off really easily after baking, don't worry.*
• Spoon out the meringue mix with a large spoon (if you heap up a tablespoon you'll get about 12 meringues) and dollop it onto the trays. I don't worry too much about the shape, I quite like them a bit rustic.
• Stick the trays into the oven (both trays as close to the middle shelf of the oven as you can manage) and turn the heat down to 140 degrees. Cook the meringues for 30 minutes, then turn the oven off, leaving the trays in the oven until it is cold. That could take about 2 hours, so make sure you don't need to use the oven when you make these.
• Freeze what you don't need right away, and store the rest in an airtight container. They'll keep for a couple of days. The meringues will be crispy on the outside, and a bit chewy, and gooey on the inside. Perfect for eating with cool vanilla ice cream with a slightly tart raspberry ripple.

P.S. I've got this Ice Cream Maker. The reason I got this one is because I needed one with a shallow bowl because my freezer has got very shallow drawers. All the other ice cream makers I looked at had enormous freezer bowls that I wouldn't have fitted my freezer. The freezer bowl on this one is 13.5cm high with a 19cm diameter. Even though this was a Hobson's Choice, now I've got this ice cream maker I would thoroughly recommend it. It's great. Does the job just fine, and is around the cheapest one I've seen. The reviews on Reevoo are very good. The woman that was moaning it took a long time to make ice cream obviously doesn't get ice cream makers. They are just to churn the air into the custard mixture ready for the freezer to freeze it into ice cream. All the other reviews at the time of writing this are a 10/10. That's what I would give this ice cream maker too. The only tip I'd give is keep the bowl in the freezer for at least 24 hours before you use it, then it'll work perfectly.