Peach Ice-Cream

What do you do in hot weather, with a punnet of peaches that need to be eaten right now? A whole punnet being too many to eat, I made peach ice cream.
The recipe starts from my trusty cornstarch base. I usually make it with cream, but this time it was just milk (as I didn't have any cream in the fridge). Made the base a bit thicker than usual (slightly higher proportion of cornstarch to liquid), to allow for the fact that the peaches would thin it again slightly. It wasn't quite frozen when we had some, but I think the texture will turn out somewhere between ice-cream and sorbet. I don't think it was peachy enough, but Duncan said it was fine. If I try this again, I'll possibly add another peach, and maybe a few raspberries.

Peach Ice-Cream
300ml + 50ml milk
1/3 cup sugar
2 1/2 tbsp cornflour
1 tsp vanilla
Dash lime juice
2 peaches, peeled and pureed
1 peach, peeled and chopped small

Put the 300ml milk and sugar in a saucepan. Heat gently until it begins to steam.
Meanwhile, mix the cornstarch with the remaining 50 ml milk.
Once the mixture in the pan is steaming, add the milk/cornflour mixture.
Cook, stirring, until it starts to thicken.
Reduce heat to low and stir for about 5 minutes until thick.
Stir in vanilla.
Remove from the heat (I pour into a jug, for easier handling later) and leave to cool slightly.
Add the lime juice to the peach puree, then add this to the base. Mix thoroughly, then add the chopped peaches.
From here, follow your preferred freezing method - I transfer to my ice-cream maker, churn until mostly frozen, then transfer to a freezer box and freeze until set.

Three Chimneys: Plums in Spiced Port Wine

Back to desserts this week, and something very simple - poached fruit. First prepare the poaching liquid. In this case, some ruby port, a little sugar, and some spices. Quite an interesting combination: cinnamon stick, bay leaf, cloves, juniper berries and cardamom. Bring to the boil, add halved plums and simmer until the plums are soft.
The plums sounded good, but they really need to go with something. One of the suggestions in the book was to serve with cinnamon ice cream. Well, if cinnamon would be good, how about adding chocolate and making a cinnamon chocolate ice-cream? So, out with my basic ice-cream recipe, and start playing.
The basic recipe is one I came across last year - it's the one I also used here. The good thing about this one is that it only needs a few ingredients, and doesn't involve making a custard using any eggs - so no fear of scrambling anything.
So, when heating the milk and cream at the start, I added a cinnamon stick to try to get some of that flavour infused in. I also added some very finely chopped chocolate which I wanted to melt in. When mixing up the cornstarch with the rest of the milk, I also added a tablespoon or so of cocoa powder. I didn't add the vanilla, thinking that it would either not go with or overpower the cinnamon. Once the mixture had thickened, I added a tablespoon or so of dark rum, partly for flavouring and partly because I'm sure I read somewhere that adding alcohol to ice-cream stops it getting too rock-hard in the freezer.
Well, I don't think I added enough alcohol to my mix, because the ice-cream did get very firm. But how did it taste? Not quite enough of all the flavours, but still very nice. And it went very well with the plums.

Lemon Ice Cream & Blueberry Sauce

You know those kitchen gadgets that you get, thinking you'll use but which end up just taking up space? I've had two of those. The bread maker, which did get used a few times but ended up acting as a shelf, got passed on to Duncan's mum. Who uses it a lot. The other gadget is, of course, an ice-cream maker. This was given to me by my brother for Christmas a year or so ago. I made one batch of ice cream from the recipes that came with it, then the bowl got put into storage in the freezer, the motor went into a cupboard, and I never used it again.

Well, until now. I don't remember which blog I got the link from, but this recipe for Cornstarch Ice Cream from the New York Times seemed like a good reason to get the machine out.

I pretty much followed the basic recipe, making the honey-jam variation, but using lemon curd in place of the jam. To be honest, this was so good that I would have been quite happy to pour the hot custard straight into a bowl and eat it. But I had to make do with sharing the scraping of the pan and jug with Duncan, after the bulk of it had gone into the machine to freeze.

The machine makes a very soft ice-cream, so one it had done its work, the ice-cream was transferred to a tub and into the freezer to firm up some more. And I started trying to think of what to put with it. I had some blueberries left in the fridge (from last week's non-blogged blueberry muffins), so made a warm blueberry sauce to spoon over.

And yes, I do have a number of other variations of this recipe I'd like to try. But maybe I should finish the tub of this that's still in the freezer first.

Recipes:

Lemon Ice Cream
1 carton double cream (284ml size) made up to 475ml with whole milk
Pinch salt
60g caster sugar
60ml honey
100ml whole milk
3 tablespoons cornflour/cornstarch
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup (80ml, I didn't weigh it) lemon curd

Mix cream/milk mixture, salt, sugar and honey in a pan. Heat until it begins to steam.
Meanwhile, mix remaining milk with the cornflour until smooth.
Once the mixture in the pan is steaming, add the milk/cornflour mixture.
Cook, stirring, until it starts to thicken.
reduce heat to low and stir for about 5 minutes until thick.
Stir in vanilla.
Remove from heat and leave to cool slightly. When still slightly warm, stir in lemon curd.
When cold, transfer to an ice-cream machine and follow manufacturer's instructions.


Blueberry Sauce
100g blueberries
5g caster sugar
2 teaspoons water

Combine all ingredients in a pan. Cover and cook over a low heat until the blueberries have burst and you have a thick sauce.