We all scream for Ice cream!

Jini and I have an infinite capacity to fantasise about our food dreams, of a midnight dessert food truck, of being paid to travel and discover secret recipes, of food and art exhibitions we will organise, and believe me, Jini has her food show host voice ready for a shoot and I have already chosen my outfit for the book launch. When we meet we enter a happy, great smelling food world of our own making

So as you will imagine, our spirits sunk badly on a day of two failed recipes. We had one baking tin full of oily, greasy chocolate fudge and another tin of fudge that was too salty and too sweet at the same time! In the middle of the grumbling and the whining about the time, energy and ingredients we had wasted, Jini suddenly said “Ice cream.” I thought it was a suggestion for us to drown our sorrows but her idea was for us to try and make her favourite dessert healthy for this blog! Now  we   love making and eating wholesome healthy foods, but will not eat frozen banana puree as ice cream, so I tried to think about all the healthy desserts I had eaten and how to transform them into ice cream!

The inspiration for this ice cream came to me from a delicious dessert I learnt to make in a cooking class I took in Sri Lanka called Watalappan! It is stunning baked custard which uses coconut milk and jaggery. And Jini always squeals with delight about the coconut jaggery ice cream in Mekong, so we decided to use this idea of coconut and jaggery flavours for our ice cream. I could not believe the deliciousness that resulted from this experiment and it is a beautiful base for you to tweak as you like!

What you need:

• 1 cup cream
• 1 cup coconut milk ( can be substituted with regular milk or any other milk of your choice)
• 1 cup milk
• 4 egg yolks
• 1/2 cup jaggery powder
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 50 g chikki/brittle of your choice

How we stir:

1. Whisk the eggs yolks lightly and set aside
2. Heat the milks and cream gently. Take off the heat just before it boils.
3. Pour 1/4th cup of the warm mixture into the yolks and while whisking simultaneously. This tempers the yolks and prepares them to be introduced into the heat.
4. Now pour the yolk mixture back into the pan, stir in the jaggery powder and allow it to thicken. Watch it like a hawk and stir continuously. It can go from a gorgeous crazy ice cream base to sweet scrambled eggs in a few seconds!
5. Once it is a thickish custard, take it off the heat, strain through a seive and allow it to cool completely.
6. Then chill overnight in a refrigerator and churn in an ice cream maker or pour into kulfi moulds like we did and enjoy!
7. We threw in some crushed chikki/peanut brittle just before putting into the freezer which provided a sexy crunchy element and elevated this to a whole new level.

This is an absolute must try, the base is a breeze to make, takes all of ten minutes and the freezer does the rest!

We want to try one with 2 table spoons of instant coffee dissolved into the milk and a table spoon of Kahlua mixed in once the base is cooled.

Do it for us will you and let us know if it is as dreamy as we imagine it to be.