Gingerbread Ice Cream

 

So despite what the weather says (did you see the photos from the St. Andrews Open?), it is summer here in Scotland.  We have had the odd burst of sunshine here in Fife but we've also had a good share of torrential downpours, as well as an amazing thunderstorm.  However, summer is summer and that means ice cream!  Although I actually made the first batch of this ice cream during the Easter holidays and my goodness is it one of the best things I have ever come up with!

Back story time!  During the Easter break the Hubby and I went on a mini holiday to Glasgow, in part because I needed to get away from everything and have an excuse not to think about work.  The Spring term was also the longest term of the year so I was exhausted by the end of it.  A couple of days away from home was very necessary.  We booked into our favourite hotel and enjoyed a couple of days meeting up with my best friend (and assessing her boyfriend, who we liked very much), lots of shopping and a long walk to and wander around the Kelvingrove museum. It was lovely.  We then usually spent the evenings curled up in our room, reading and watching TV and amongst the things we watched was MasterChef.

This started us on a bit of a binge watch of MasterChef on the iPlayer.  I like watching people make food.  It is fascinating.  Anyway, one thing that quite a few contestants made was ice cream (how they did so in an hour baffled me) and amongst the flavours that got made was ginger.  This got me thinking back to Christmas when I was contemplating the idea of a gingerbread ice cream as a nice holiday themed dessert.  I figured this holiday, even though it was not the Christmas one, was a good time to finally put the idea into practise. 

I decided to use ginger ice cream as a basis for my recipe and luckily my David Lebovitz book provided me with one of those.  However, I knew I would not get the gingerbread taste from just ginger.  So I switched out caster sugar for a mix of muscovado sugar and golden syrup, two of the key ingredients in any good gingerbread recipe.  I also decided to use just cream, rather than a combination of cream and milk.  More fat in ice cream means less ice crystals develop when frozen.  I also think it tastes better.  I had to estimate amounts for the different ingredients but I did a pretty good job since it turned out really well (why yes, I am a bit smug about this one).  For a little bit of extra flare, I baked some tiny gingerbread flowers for the original batch that were mixed in after churning along with some gingerbread crumbs.  For my most recent batch I used store bought gingerbread, which works just as well in my opinion, though the Hubby disagrees.

I was surprised at how much this tastes like gingerbread!  It is almost bizarre, given it's cold ice cream but has that delicious sweet heat that comes with good gingerbread.  The biscuit crumbs throughout add a nice bit of crunch too.  This stuff is so scrummy!  I like it, the Hubby likes it and so do his parents.  The Hubby's dad is not a big ice cream person but he loved this and went back for more so if that isn't a good enough endorsement, I don't know what else to tell you.

Recipe - inspired by Fresh Ginger Ice Cream from The Perfect Scoop
Makes about 1 litre

• 85g/3oz fresh ginger root
• 750ml/26fl.oz double cream
• 6 tbsp golden syrup
• 80g/3oz muscovado sugar
• Pinch of salt
• 5 egg yolks 
• Gingerbread biscuits (amount is up to you)

1. Slice up the ginger root into thin slices and place in a saucepan.
2. Cover with 2cm of water, bring to the boil and then let it boil for 2 minutes.
3. Remove from the heat and drain the water.
4. Add the sugar, salt, golden syrup and 500ml of the cream to the saucepan.
5. Stir over a medium heat until the sugar has melted and the mixture is warm and a nice golden brown colour.
6. Remove from the heat, cover and allow to steep for an hour.
7. Put the remaining cream in a large bowl and set a sieve over the top.
8. In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks.
9. Use a slotted spoon to remove the pieces of ginger root from the cream mixture and discard.
10. Warm the mixture through.
11. Add the warmed cream mixture to the egg yolks, whisking them the entire time, and then add everything back into the saucepan.
12. Cook the mixture over a low to medium heat, stirring with a spatula the whole time.  Make sure the spatula scrapes the bottom of the pan and that you do not allow the mixture to boil.  Keep cooking until the custard thickens and coats the spatula.
13. Pour the custard through the sieve into the cream.
14. Place the bowl of custard into an ice bath and stir continuously until the mixture has cooled.
15. Chill thoroughly in the fridge before transferring to your ice cream maker and continue according to manufacturer's instructions.
16. Once the ice cream has churned and thickened, place the gingerbread into a bag and crush with a rolling pin so that you have a mix of larger pieces and crumbs.  Add these to the ice cream and churn for about 2 minutes before transferring to a freezer-proof container.  Freeze for at least an hour before serving.

Lemon Blueberry Doughnuts with White Chocolate Drizzle

This is a bake from a while back: Valentine's Day to be exact.  Being swamped with work was not going to stop me from baking something sweet for my Hubby.  Plus we had a mini holiday that weekend.  Sadly, no time to blog back then but I did grab some snaps in the hopes I would get around to it (and not just because I wanted to play with my new camera).  5 months later isn't too bad...right? 

Anyway, if you've been following this blog a while, you'll know by now that the Hubby loves lemon and blueberry as a flavour combination so I usually incorporate it into bakes meant for him.  And, as usual, I wanted to try something new.  So I went with doughnuts.  The Hubby does like doughnuts, though he prefers the jam filled kind to the glazed sort.  Baking fruit into doughnuts is a bit like filling with jam...Okay, one day I will do proper jam filled doughnuts for him. I need more excuses to use my doughnut pan.  Though I will need to get a syringe somewhere down the line.  Better add that to the birthday wishlist.

There's not much to say about the recipe.  It was pretty simple to do.  The batter is quite thick so getting a smooth finish in the tin was a little tricky.  The other problem I had was getting the doughnuts out the tin again after baking because some of the blueberries would adhere to it.   Letting it cool a little helped with that one.

I did decide to change the finish on the doughnuts.  The original recipe uses a lemon sugar.  That would likely have gone down well too but I wanted to fancy it up a little more.  And if there is anything that makes the lemon and blueberry combination even better, it's white chocolate.  So a white chocolate drizzle was the way I decided to go.  The sprinkles were a bonus.  I found some interesting new sprinkles by Dr Oetker when doing my grocery shopping online and decided to buy a couple.  Amongst my choices were lemon meringue sprinkles.  I decided they would be the perfect finish to add a little extra flare to the doughnuts, as well as a bit of crunch.

The Hubby very much enjoyed these doughnuts and did eat all 10 by himself.  I was very happy.

Recipe - adapted from Spark Recipes

Makes 10 doughnuts

Doughnuts:

• 100g/3.5oz white whole wheat flour
• 100g/3.5oz plain flour
• 75g/2.5oz granulated sugar
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 egg
• 125ml/4.5fl.oz plain yoghurt
• 1 tbsp rapeseed oil
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 1 tbsp lemon juice 
• 200g/7oz fresh blueberries

Topping:

• 100g/3.5oz white chocolate
• Dr Oetker Lemon Meringue Sprinkles or other sprinkle type decoration (optional) 

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/375°F/Gas Mark 4 and grease a doughnut pan with butter or cooking spray.  Wash and dry the blueberries.
2. Combine all the dry ingredients for the doughnuts in a large bowl.
3. In a separate bowl, mix together all the wet ingredients except the blueberries.
4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir in until just combined.
5. Gently fold in the blueberries.
6. Put 2 tablespoons of batter into each doughnut form in the tin and smooth out.
7. Bake for about 10 minutes, or until golden brown.  Allow to cool in the pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack.  
8. When doughnuts have cooled, melt the white chocolate in a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water.
9. Drizzle the chocolate over doughnuts and sprinkle on chosen decoration.  Leave to set.

Citrus Summer Fruit Drizzle Cake

Okay, well, long time no post, huh?  Last post was in December last year and now it's July!  This was a bit of an unexpected hiatus but a necessary one.  I became swamped with work after the Christmas holidays as I did not do so well in my first term at school and needed to make it up.  This got made worse by everyone getting sick or other things coming up which meant things were not getting done at reasonable times and ended up having to be done in a very short space of time.  Very stressful.  So much so that I ended up at the doctor's and have been given medication for anxiety, which I've always had but got worse these last couple of years.  Fun fun fun.  Anyway, the good news is that I did pass my probation year and I am a fully qualified teacher!  Bad news is that currently I don't have a job after the summer.  I didn't do so good in the interview as what I thought I was saying was not coming across.  Ah well.  I've just got to keep trying and see what comes up.

But we're not here to listen to me moan; we're here about cake!  Hectic work life meant there was little time for baking in the last few months but when I was doing reports it was something I just had to make time for.  Writing reports is so so dull and takes forever!  I had to break it into smaller blocks per day and then even smaller ones after that.  Baking was then fitted in between the blocks to keep me sane. 

 

This looked like a nice, summery bake.  I like baking with fruit, even if I am not keen to eat it.  I also think it looks aesthetically pleasing too without being too complicated.  I ended up making two of these; one for home and one for school.  I bought a mixed box of fruit from Sainsbury's which had strawberries, raspberries and blackberries in.  I then bulked it out a little with an extra tub of blueberries.  I also decided I would zest up the cake with some lime in the batter rather than just using the juice in the drizzle.  It worked really well.  It is a really moist cake with a nice tang to offset the sweetness of the fruit.  Both cakes were gobbled up very quickly.

And just before I let you have the recipe, I want to give a shout-out to my Hubby.  One of the biggest tragedies of not baking much has been the lack of food photography I have gotten to do!  Doubly so because that wonderful, sweet husband of mine gave me a DSLR camera for Christmas!  I was so surprised and felt so spoilt.  It has been so fun to use and takes such lovely pictures.  I am still getting to grips with it but I think I did a pretty good job with these snaps!

Recipe -  Adapted from BBC GoodFood
Makes a 2lb loaf cake


Cake:

• 175g/6oz butter
• 175g/6oz golden caster sugar
• 250g/9oz self-raising flour
• 2 large eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• Zest of 2 limes
• 100g/3.5oz mixed summer fruits 

Drizzle:

• 75g/2.5oz mixed summer fruits
• 1-2tbsp lime juice
• 140g/5oz granulated sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4 and grease a 900g/2lb loaf tin with butter.  Line the base with a long strip of greaseproof paper so that the ends hang out over the sides of the tin (it will help you remove the cake from the tin later).
2. In a large bowl mix together the butter, sugar, flour, eggs, lime zest and vanilla extract  until the batter is smooth, pale and creamy.  It will be very thick.
3. Put a third of the mix into the cake tin then scatter half of the fruit over the top.
4. Spread another third of the cake mix over the top and then scatter on the rest of the fruit.  
5. Finally top with the last of the cake mix and smooth over with a spoon.
6. Bake for about 1 hour, or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
7. Put the fruit and sugar for the drizzle in a bowl with the lime juice and stir together, mashing the fruit a little as you do.
8. When you have removed the cake from the oven poke it all over with a skewer.
9. Spoon the drizzle over the cake then leave inside the tin until the cake is cool and the topping is set.  
10. Use the strip of paper to help remove the cake from the tin.