Well, what's the point in eating homemade ice cream for breakfast?
This happened just because I got home at 9:30 after a day that was too busy for me to even think about dinner (shock! Horror!) and felt like making ice cream. Niki Segnit's The Flavour Thesaurus got me wanting to make this in a way that even Nigella's Forever Summer didn't, although that could be more to do with my experience as a cook than either of the authors.
It was the idea of thyme ice cream, specifically, coated in chocolate sauce, that was making me itch. I think, however, that that is something that needs to be done properly - I don't want to make a herbed ice cream with my dried herbs. Hopefully I'll soon be able to grow some, and have herb-infused ice cream just in time for summer. In the meantime, though, I went with plain vanilla on my first try, with information from The Guardian Food Blog to help. I'd also love to use the first method listed on this page one day, because it just sounds like fun.
The ice cream was delicious! And superb for breakfast. All I need now are some berries to mix it with.
Vanilla Ice Cream
Fills 1 sandwich-sized tupperware
1.5 cups cream
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla powder
Pour the sugar into a freezable bowl or tupperware, and pour the cream on top. Be a bit liberal with the cream - you want more like 1.6 cups (about 400ml).
Add the vanilla powder.
And stir! This should only take a couple of minutes. Cover the bowl and put it in the freezer, noting what time it is.
About half an hour after the bowl first goes in the freezer, take it out and stir it for about two minutes, making sure to pull all of the frozen bits away from the edges and bottom. If you over-churn, the final result will be lumpy-looking rather than smooth. If your arm gets tired, you're over-churning.
Repeat the "thirty minutes' freeze/churn" until you have churned the ice cream four times in total. Then leave in the freezer for at least another hour - I left mine for about eleven as I went to bed and then to yoga before checking on it again, so I can't comment on how good it would be after a shorter period of time.
Looks like ice cream...
Tastes like ice cream...
It's bloody ice cream!
Serve, with or without the sugar syrup that will have settled at the bottom of the tupperware.
