A new ice-cream maker

We treated ourselves to a big red American Retro KitchenAid Artisan stand mixer as a joint Christmas present for 2014, Patricia's Mum's old Kenwood Chef having finally given up the ghost.

We picked the right time, as KitchenAid were giving away an ice-cream maker valued at over £70 as part of a promotion. This arrived a few days after the mixer and I couldn't wait to try it out.

I looked at lots of recipes for plain vanilla ice cream and picked one more-or-less at random. Here is what I ended up doing::

Ingredients

600ml double cream
600ml whole milk
230g caster sugar
6 large egg yolks
1 dessertspoon posh vanilla extract

Method

1. Freeze the ice-cream maker bowl for at least 15 hours
   
2. Mix the cream, milk and half the sugar and bring just to the boil
3. Add the vanilla and leave to cool
4. Cream the yolks and the rest of the sugar (using the new machine, of course!)
5. Mix 250ml of the cooled cream/milk mixture with the creamed yolks
6. Bring the rest of the cooled cream/milk mixture back just to the boil
7. Stir in the egg mixture
8. Cook over a low gas until the mixture will coat the back of a spoon
9. Cool as quickly as possible in an ice/water bath
10. Chill in the fridge until very cold
11. Set up the KitchenAid with the ice-cream maker and start running
12. Gently pour in the chilled mixture
13. Churn until a 'soft scoop' consistency is reached
14. Transfer to plastic containers and freeze

To serve

Move a container to the bottom of the fridge for 1-2 hours. Scoop and add the garnish of your choice (we used maple syrup for our first test). Eat and be amazed. We were - the ice-cream had just the right consistency and was buttery-smooth with no trace of ice crystals.

Rum and raisin for Christmas

I had 470 grams of whipped cream left over from a family gathering a week or go. It would have been criminal to dump it, so yesterday I added 130 grams of liquid double cream and 600ml of semi-skimmed milk (I was too lazy to walk over the road for whole milk and with all that cream I didn't think it would make a lot of difference).

Otherwise, apart from reducing the sugar to 200ml and increasing the vanilla extract to one tablespoon, I followed the recipe above. I decided to chill the custard overnight, and at the same time I measured out 300ml of sultanas in a old photographic measuring cylinder and just covered them with dark rum.

By this morning the sultanas were wonderfully soft and plumped up, and the level of the rum had gone down quite a way - in fact, when I strained the fruit there was only just over a tablespoon of liquid left. So that went into the custard, and 15 minutes into the churning process I spooned the sultanas into the ice-cream maker. The machine had no trouble mixing them in, and after another quarter of an hour I decanted the still-soft ice-cream into containers and put them in the freezer.

Watch this space for a report...