Berry swirl cheesecake ice cream

My other half and I were lucky enough to take advantage of his Dad's bumper crop of strawberries and raspberries over the last couple of weekends and had a haul of about 6 kg in all. When it came to deciding what we were going to do with them, I already had my ideas planned out. I made a not terribly successful strawberry curd, but one thing that really worked was a thick, creamy and luscious ice cream.

I really like making ice cream but making a custard with eggs etc can be a bit of a faff so I thought just simple double cream with some mascarpone would give me a deliciously smooth texture. The ice cream was very popular and didn't last long but with mascarpone and double cream in it it's not exactly low fat so it's for special occassions only!

Ingredients

300 ml double cream
100 ml milk
6 tbspoon icing sugar
1 tsp Vanilla extract
Generous glug of Cointreau
Handful each of raspberries and strawberries
100g caster sugar
250g tub mascarpone

Put the strawberries and raspberries in a pan with the caster sugar and warm until the sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil and reduce the mixture if your strawberries are a bit watery. Allow to cool. Put the mascarpone in a bowl and add the icing sugar and vanilla extract. Mix to combine then add the cream and milk and mix well with a whisk. Add this mixture to your ice cream maker and churn until very thick and coming away from the sides. While the ice cream is churning push the fruit mix through a sieve to remove the seeds, then add the Cointreau and set aside. Once the ice cream has churned marble the fruity coulis through it and put in the freezer to set fully. Serve the ice cream with some buttery shortbread.

Vanilla panna cotta with strawberries and lemon thyme sugar

I have seen quite a few recipes for panna cotta recently and since I have never tried to make it, I wanted to give it a go. I found this recipe and thought it looked nice and simple and now that the strawberries in my garden were starting to blush into a vibrant red colour, I wanted to serve them with it.

I first of all made the lemon thyme sugar. I bought a bunch of lemon thyme the other day to go with squid but I don't actually like it much in savoury things as I think it tastes a bit soapy so I wondered whether I could make something sweet with it. Basil sugar seems to be very fashionable at the minute so I thought I would try and do the same with lemon thyme.

Pick the leaves off a small bunch of lemon thyme and blitz in a blender with about 6 tablespoons of caster sugar. It should go a nice green colour but will also be a bit damp so spread it out on a baking sheet and put in a very low oven for about 10-15 minutes until it has dried out. You can then keep your sugar in a sealed container and use it whenever you like. 

I made the panna cotta next and left it to cool in the fridge for an hour or so. 

Next take a couple of handfuls of fresh ripe strawberries (you can pretty much use any fruit you like here) hull and halve them and put into a saucepan with a tablespoon of icing sugar and about half a tablespoon of Limoncello liqueur. Warm the berries until the juices start to run but don't let the strawberries go too soft. Take off the heat and leave to cool. 

Once the panna cotta is set, loosen it from it's mould and turn out onto a plate, scatter the strawberries around and garnish with the lemon thyme sugar.



The texture and taste of the panna cotta was lovely but the only thing I didn't like was that all the vanilla seeds sunk to the bottom of the mould and made the panna cotta look burnt and I also need to work on getting them cleanly out of the mould. I think my blowtorch may have to be used. I will definitely have another go at making panna cotta and might try a few different flavours too. 

Tropical temperatures

Well not really tropical, but it has been really warm here all of a sudden so, having remembered that I had loads of egg whites in the freezer, I decided to do a tropical tasting pavlova. I tend to use this recipe from the BBC food web site and it works really well, giving a nice marshmallowy meringue. 

After making the meringue and allowing to cool, toast a handful of desiccated coconut in a dry frying pan and leave to cool. Take 250g of mascarpone and the same of yoghurt and put into a bowl. It doesn't matter what yoghurt, but nothing too thick as the mascarpone is very thick. Add the zest of a lime a couple of tablespoons of icing sugar and about 50ml of dark rum (or malibu would also be nice to give an extra coconut flavour) and mix well. Spread the mixture evenly all over the meringue and top with 1 ripe mango cut into chunks and finally the toasted coconut. Then sit out in the sun with a fork and a large wedge of meringue on your plate.