An adventure with allotment strawberries leads to ice Cream for breakfast

6/10/2014

Yesterday was an eventful day. Someone drove into me while I was stationary. I had to drive my daughter to the orthodontist 20 miles away, only to be told there was an 18 month waiting list for braces. I had a ton of work to do on my Autumn Collection, and some personal stuff to see to.

Despite this, I managed to make ice cream. I try and get at least one nice thing into every day, however stressful, and yesterday this was making something with the strawberries I had picked from my Mum's allotment the day before. When you have picked the fruit yourself, and your Mum has grown it, you feel much more motivated to make the most of it, and I therefore wanted to make something special. I had posted a photo on my facebook page the day before asking for suggestions, and someone had suggested ice cream. This idea appealed and I set about finding a recipe that didn't require a trip to the shops (something I definitely didn't have time for). I couldn't find one, so I made this up with what I happened to have in the house.

I started making it at about 2.30pm, which turns out not to have been soon enough to have lovely frozen ice cream for pudding at 7pm! Instead, we had semi-freddo. To get a good photo of the ice cream in its actual frozen state, however, I had ice cream for breakfast today for probably the first time in my life. It was good! Why is ice cream not on the menu for breakfast ordinarily, I now ask myself?!

Ingredients

525g strawberries, hulled

250g mascapone

125g double cream

125g icing sugar

Makes approx 1 litre of ice cream

Method

Blitz the strawberries in a food processor. Add the cream and blitz again.
Mix the icing sugar and mascapone
Combine the mixtures and whisk together in a food processor or by hand until the mixture thickens a little.
If using an ice cream maker, transfer the mixture to this and follow the manufacturers instructions. If not, then put in the freezer for an hour in an ice cream container.
Remove from the freezer and put back into the food processor and whisk again for 15 seconds or so (not too long).
Quickly decant back into the ice cream container and freeze again for another hour.
Repeat steps 5 and 6 once or twice more. The more times you do it, the creamier your ice cream will be. On the last freeze, you will need at least 2 - 3 hours before the ice cream is ready to eat. Remove from freezer 20 minutes before serving.