Have you ever made home-made ice cream without an ice cream maker? Better still, have you ever tried to find a recipe online for making ice cream without an ice cream maker? It is not easy – finding a recipe that is! My mum suggested this challenge and I thought it was a great idea. I set out trying to find a recipe and a few times thought I had got one only to get to the last instruction and the recipe would say to “put it in your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer’s instructions”. It was very frustrating! And then I remembered, my many (and I mean many!) recipe books in the flat. I had a quick rummage and found Jamie Oliver has kindly provided a recipe which works with or without an ice cream machine. Yay 🙂
Although I had found a recipe for vanilla ice cream, I kept having a sneaky look online and do you know what I found? One of my new blogging friends has blogged about the same recipe. You can see read about Laura’s experience at Feast Wisely.
Jamie’s book (Jamie’s Comfort Food) not only gives you a lovely recipe for vanilla ice cream, it also gives 4 delicious flavour variations. One of my mum’s favourites is rum and raisin ice cream – she say’s its her ‘holiday ice cream’ but I think she would have it all the time if she could 😉 I know I would!
So for the rum raisin ice cream you will need the following ingredients:-
- 100g raisins
- 150ml dark spiced rum
- 2 vanilla pods
- 500ml whole milk
- 250ml double cream
- 7 large eggs
- 150g golden caster sugar
These quantities make 1 litre of ice cream and Jamie helpfully tells me that 1 scoop is 106 calories. I however like to believe that anything which is homemade is guilt free, so we don’t need to worry about the calorie content 🙂
Anyway, on with the recipe. I started off by putting the raisins in a bowl and covering them with the spiced rum. I covered the bowl with cling film and left it on the side for around a couple of hours.
Once I had about half hour left, I got on with making the vanilla ice cream. I halved the vanilla pods lengthways and scraped out the seeds. I’ve seen chef’s do this on TV and it looks really simple…it wasn’t! I got in a bit of a mess but I managed to scrape most of the seeds out and get them in the pan. I added the pods to the seeds and poured over the milk and cream.
I put the pan on a low heat to gently warm for 15 minutes and then took it off the heat.
Whilst the vanilla cream mixture was cooling slightly, I separated my eggs and put the yolks in a bowl.
Practical tip: Jamie advises to freeze the egg whites in a sandwich bag to make meringues for another day. I therefore dutifully put the whites in a plastic container and put in the fridge so I could later make room for it in the freezer – I then promptly forgot to do this and ended up throwing away the whites! Silly me!
I whisked the yolks and caster sugar with a balloon whisk until pale.
Before combining the vanilla milk with the egg/sugar mix, I sorted out the soaked raisins. I took out around half and put them to one side. I then used a hand blender to blitz the remaining raisins and rum together until it was a smooth purée.
I then took the vanilla cream mixture and poured it through a sieve into my egg/sugar mix. I added a bit at a time and whisked thoroughly between each addition. At the end, I made sure to push through as many vanilla seeds as possible – I mean come on, the more true vanilla flavour you can get the better!
I added the combined mixture back into my pan and put it over a very low heat. I stirred constantly, patiently waiting for the mixture to thicken. Jamie’s says this should take about 15 minutes but it took me longer. I had my pan on a very low heat and perhaps I could have turned it up slightly but I didn’t want to burn it. When it was finally thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, I was happy it was done.
I poured the mixture in to a clean bowl and left it to cool – this took about a couple of hours.
Time to add the rum/raisin to my vanilla ice cream. I poured in the purée and whole raisins into the cooled ice cream base and gave it a good stir. I then poured it all into my ice cream contained (a simple klick lock storage box).
I put the container into my freezer and set the time for 30 minutes. According to the recipe you need to whisk the ice cream every 30 minutes for about 3 to 4 hours to help break up the ice crystals. The aim is to do this until the ice cream is nicely set.
When I read Laura’s blog, she mentioned that she stopped stirring too soon and ended up with some ice crystals. I therefore tried to preserver and when I had reached 4 hours and it still was set, I just kept going with my 30 minutes schedule.
I got to 5 and a half hours and it still wasn’t set! It was also time for bed so I just left it for the night and hoped it would be okay in the morning.
So here it is…
It looked okay – except that the whole raisins had definitely all sunk to the bottom of the container! It’s a nice treat for when you get to the bottom 🙂
Now, I don’t know about you but if I am going to have ice cream, it clearly has to be served with either hot chocolate fudge cake, a cone or perhaps best of all, cookies! So I also made some chocolate chip cookies to sandwich together with the ice cream.
Be sure to come back after the end of Challenge 52 when I will be sharing my foolproof recipe for these delicious cookies.
This was absolutely delicious! Dave tried a TINY bit and said “whoaa, you can taste the rum in that!”. Well that’s what we want – rum, raisin and vanilla galore. I’ve now got to be controlled and make sure I don’t eat the whole lot before my mum next comes to visit!
Coming up next week, Challenge No. 20 – maple syrup glazed ham! Hope to see you then.
mygastroadventure.com 