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.

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.