It's all about the cool-down.

It can't have escaped your notice that the UK has been experiencing a bit of a heatwave just lately.  And what better way to cool down than with ice cream?  So here is a chilled blog post about ice cream based desserts.

I lost my new recipe mojo a bit recently but it is now firmly BACK! I had a fab evening with my daughter the other week, sitting on the kitchen sofa, fairy lights on, sharing a bottle of wine (now she's old enough - I am happy to have a wine-drinking companion again!) and planning new recipes.  She found a recipe on the BBC Good Food site called Club Tropicana Ice Cream Cake which we both immediately knew just had to be made.  Reminiscent of the 80s Wham! song with bright dayglo colours and strong fruity flavours it looked so pretty and my end result, though not as perfect as the BBC photo, was fairly impressive and the taste got 5 stars from the family.

To be fair it was more about assembly than actual cooking, but if you wanted to you could make the ice cream, sorbets and cake from scratch.  I didn't this time though. I started with a Madeira cake from Lidl which happened to be flavoured with zesty lime, I felt this really improved the recipe. I trimmed the dark edges off first and cut into 5mm thick slices.  The offcuts were appreciated by my son,no food waste in this family if we can help it! 

I had lined a normal sized loaf tin with several layers of cling film, and the first layer of cake went into the bottom, followed by a layer of mango and passion fruit sorbet, smoothed as flat as I could with a spoon. Into the freezer it went for 10 minutes, then a layer of good vanilla ice cream was added, and another layer of cake,  This was followed by a layer of melted dark chocolate and another 10 minutes in the freezer.  Next came a layer of raspberry sorbet and a final layer of cake.  All was covered in another layer of cling film and frozen until solid.

When it was time to serve, I turned it out and removed the cling film carefully, then topped with whipped cream and cocktail (maraschino) cherries.  The cherries have a story all of their own as they were the most difficult ingredient to find.  I finally found them by asking someone in Tesco,only to be told "Nobody can EVER find cocktail cherries! They're with the pickled gherkins!!" Readers may remember a blog post from several Christmases ago where I had a similar problem with cherries in Kirsch for a Black Forest Trifle.

Anyway, it was a great success, including with my Mum who came for dinner at just the right moment to help eat it.

Another new recipe made recently was Millionaire's Shortbread lollies.  I had some lolly moulds but had lost them, so we ordered  some more on eBay without looking carefully at the dimensions and they were tiny when they arrived.  Happily, however the larger ones had been found by then so we made two sizes.

They were pretty simple, a mixture of evaporated milk and double cream was frozen in the moulds, and when frozen decorated with a drizzle of melted chocolate, gold crunch,shimmer spray, caramel sauce and shortbread crumbs. The small ones were actually just the right size for me. The large one was a bit too much for my son but the cat loved what was left of it when he'd finished! They were meant to have edible gold on, but I had run out.  Next time...

Thanks for reading,

Caroline x