Nigella's Strawberry Ice Cream With A Twist

I know it's a bit late in the Summer, however a month ago Emily (recipesandreviews.co.uk) came over to my house, where we decided to have a baking day. This was a very exciting, super hectic day which evolved strongly around people with a sweet tooth! Emily posted about her amazing (and I mean amazing!) macarons and immense chocolate brownie and peanut butter cookie stack. I decided to make a home made strawberry ice cream sandwich which had way more technical points than I thought!

So to start I used Nigella's Strawberry Ice Cream Recipe which I found to be the most indulgent of the few I came across. It also looked very simple too, and it is so long as you leave plenty of time for cooling between each section.

Ingredients

• 500 grams strawberries
• 175 grams caster sugar (plus 2 tablespoons)
• 500 ml full fat milk
• 500 ml double cream
• 1 vanilla pod
• 10 large egg yolks
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
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• To start, you must ensure your ice cream maker has been in the freezer over night for at least 12-24 hours. 

1. Hull (remove the stalks) and roughly chop the strawberries, put them into a large bowl and sprinkle over the 2 tablespoons of caster sugar and leave them to steep and infuse with flavour. I also find that placing clingfilm over the top and keeping the bowl at room temperature also helped with the seeping process.

1. Pour the milk and cream into a heavy-based saucepan, and add the vanilla pod, split down the middle length ways. Bring the pan nearly to the boil and then take it off the heat and leave to infuse for 20 minutes. You may also find this may take longer than 20 minutes but it is important that it cools to prevent the ice cream from splitting later in the process.

1. In a large bowl whisk the egg yolks and the 175g sugar until thick and pale yellow. Take the vanilla pod out of the milk and cream and pour, whisking all the while, the warm liquid over the yolks. Put the cleaned-out pan back on the heat with the cream, milk, egg and sugar mixture and stir the custard until it thickens, then take it off the heat and pour it into a bowl to cool. Again, you may find this takes at least an hour or so. You may want to put this in the fridge at this point.

1. Puree the strawberries in a processor, and when the custard is cool fold in the lemon juice and strawberry puree.

1. At this point you can either freeze the ice cream in an ice-cream maker, or in a plastic tub in the freezer. If you do the latter you should whip it out every hour for 3 hours as it freezes and give it a good beating, either with an electric whisk, by hand or in the processer. That gets rid of any ice crystals that form, that make the ice cream crunchy rather than smooth. Also as as side note - you may want to put your mixture into a jug so it's easier to pour into the ice cream maker. 

So then, on to the cookie sandwiches! I used a basic cookie dough recipe which actually turned out to be pretty damn good. The cookie dough tasted just like Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough so I froze some of it to make another ice cream with at a later date. 

Ingredients:

225g Butter, softened

110g Caster Sugar

275g Plain Flour

75g White or Milk Chocolate (or both)

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• Preheat the oven at 170oC (375oF) or gas mark 3.

• Cream the butter in a large bowl or in a food mixer until it is soft. Add the sugar and beat until the mixture is light and fluffy.

• Sift the flour into the mixture and add optional ingredients. Bring the mixture together until it forms a dough.

• Using your hands, make walnut sized balls and place them slightly apart from each other on a tray. Flatten the balls with the back of a fork and bake them in the oven for around 15 mins until they are golden brown and slightly firm on top.

Place the cookies onto a cooling rack and leave them there for around 15 mins.

Then the final step gets a tiny bit technical. If you have an empty ice cream tub this comes in very handy as you get the perfect circle for your sandwich.

Place some of the ice cream mix into the tub and freeze for another hour which allows the ice cream to go rock hard.

After this time, take out the tub from the freezer and slice up the tub in 2cm slices. once you've done this all you now need to do is sandwich them together and enjoy!

i hope you've enjoyed this post and let me know down in the comments if you've made ice cream before from scratch or if you've tried this one!

Enjoy 

xXx