Ice Cream Ireland

 I’m in a sweet frame of mind, and here’s a toffee I love to munch on. It’s also used in our Toffee Ice Cream, and I’ll put up the recipe for that in due course. I always love making candy, because I find it such a miracle that sugar can transform itself so radically.

This toffee is very dark and rich, since the recipe calls for dark brown sugar, and one inevitably eats far too much of it. One can, of course, make it with light brown or even regular sugar, but I like the deep flavour of the molasses contained in dark brown sugar.

Ingredients:

• 150 g butter
• 200 g dark brown sugar
• 50 ml water
• 1 teaspoon golden syrup

What to Do:

1. Butter a small baking dish.
2. Combine all of the ingredients in a thick-bottomed saucepan.
3. Stir over medium heat until the ingredients are combined.
4. Turn up the heat and stop stirring.
5. It will start boiling.
6. If it starts smoking around the edges, stir gently in a circle around the edge to keep it from burning.
7. Check if it’s ready by dropping a bit of the toffee in a cup of cold water. It should be firm but not hard to the touch.
8. Immediately remove from the heat and pour into the buttered baking dish.
9. Allow to cool somewhat.
10. When it’s mostly hardened, score it with a knife to make it easier to break.
11. Allow to cool completely, break up and enjoy!

Notes:

1. A word of caution - caramelised sugar is very, very hot, so please take care when making this!
2. Make sure the pan is very clean before you start. If there is residue already on the pan, it is more likely the candy will burn.
3. The final product will have the consistency of the bit you drop into the cold water. If you like your toffee soft, take it off the heat when it forms a soft ball when dropped in the water. If you like your toffee hard, keep cooking and take it off the heat when it forms a hard ball in the water.

Technorati tags: caramel, recipe, toffee, ice cream, candy

 Our best-selling ice cream in our shops is Honeycomb crunchy caramel (this ice cream flavour originates in New Zealand, where they call it “hokey pokey“), and last night I set about final testing on the recipe for the crunchy bits that make it so distinctive. Known also as “cinder toffee” and “sponge candy,” it is as actually quite easy to make.

By the way, if anyone knows who invented the candy, please pass it on!

There are so many ways to make this, and if you want to explore other recipes, you’ll find variations here, here, here and here.

Here’s what works for me, and it lasts fairly well without going soggy.

Honeycomb Caramel Candy

Ingredients:

• 400g sugar
• 100ml water
• 40ml golden syrup (about 2 tablespoons)
• 1 tablespoon baking soda

What to do:

1. Combine the water, golden syrup and sugar and cook over medium heat without stirring until the sugar dissolves.
2. Turn up the heat until the mixture becomes the deep golden colour of honeycomb, stirring if it cooks unevenly.
3. Stir in the baking soda, until it is fully combined, but don’t over-mix! It will froth up and more than triple in volume.
4. Immediately pour out onto a non-stick baking mat or greased baking sheet.
5. Allow to cool fully.
6. Break into pieces and enjoy!

Note: 1. For those scientifically minded, the sugar mixture should reach hard crack stage, which you can test by using a candy thermometer or spooning a few drops into a glass of cold water, where it should immediately harden and break easily when you take it out. That being said, I find that once the colour is right, the temperature is right!

2. Make sure there are no lumps in the baking soda, or it might not dissolve fully!

Technorati tags: caramel, honeycomb, recipe, toffee, ice cream, candy

 As part of the food festival, my brother and I will do a cooking demonstration in St. James’ Church in Dingle (Saturday, 3:30). We’ve decided to do brown bread ice cream with a chocolate whiskey sauce. I’ve been tinkering away with the sauce, and here’s what I’ve come up with…

Chocolate Whiskey Sauce

Ingredients:

• 150g good quality dark chocolate (I used 2 bars of Valrhona Gran Couva)
• 100ml milk
• 20g sugar (around 1.5 tablespoon)
• 45ml cream (about 3 tablespoon)
• 30ml whiskey (about 2 tablespoons)

What to do:

1. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler.
2. Heat the milk and sugar in a very small saucepan over low heat to a low simmer, stirring until the sugar is dissolved.
3. Add the milk in small parts to the melted chocolate, stirring all the time until you have a smooth, glossy emulsion.
4. Stir in the cream.
5. Allow to cool completely.
6. Stir in the whiskey.

Note: you can freeze this sauce if you won’t use it all soon. Otherwise, it will last in the fridge about 3 days.

Technorati tags: chocolate sauce, whiskey, chocolate, ice cream, recipe 

 This recipe, from this week’s Irish Times article, is a simple way of enjoying great quality chocolate and ice cream together. It is designed to form an unsweetened hard crust on ice cream, and I suggest vanilla, so you don’t have competing flavours. The butter is simply to make the chocolate less brittle…

Gourmet Chocolate Crust

Ingredients:

• 100g high quality, dark chocolate
• 10g (2 teasp) unsalted butter

What to do:

1. Melt the chocolate and butter together in a double boiler or microwave.
2. Stir until fully combined.
3. Pour over vanilla ice cream.

Enjoy!

Technorati tags: hard, sauce, chocolate, ice cream, recipe 

With raspberries in season, a great topping for ice cream is raspberry coulis. It’s tart and delicious and dead simple to make! 

Murphys Raspberry Coulis

Ingredients:

• Small punnet (125 gm) raspberries
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon fresh lime juice

What to do:

1. Combine all the ingredients in a blender or food process and puree until smooth.
2. Pass through a fine sieve using a rubber spatula or the back of a wooden spoon until only the seeds are left.
3. Discard the seeds.
4. Enjoy!

Yield: 150 ml coulis

It will last around 3 days if refrigerated, but I suggest you eat it straight away!

Technorati tags: raspberry, lime, coulis, sauce, recipe

 I made one of the tastiest things I have in a while - Cajeta. Similar to Dulce de Leche, this Mexican treat is made by reducing goat’s milk with cinnamon and sugar until it caramelises.

The recipe I used was out of Rick Bayless‘ excellent book, Mexican Kitchen. The result was thick, creamy, and utterly delicious.

In fact, I have never made anything from that cookbook that wasn’t fantastic (as long as I could get my hands on the ingredients, which isn’t easy in Ireland!)

If you want to try it, there is a recipe here or here.

We ate it mostly over vanilla ice cream (see right), and it disappeared pretty quickly, I can tell you. Ausra, from our Dingle shop found an excellent use for it - a Cajeta Latte - a Mexican twist on a caramel latte. Yum!

Technorati tags: caramel, cajeta, recipe, goat’s milk, cinnamon, dessert      

 I have written about Sweetbank Farm several times, the fruit farm in Wicklow. Well, we have just received our first fruit from them - trays of luscious strawberries.

It’s good timing, because I’ve had strawberry and sage on the brain for a while now.

I’ll get around to making ice cream from it, but I started by making a coulis, which can be used as a sauce for many different desserts. It’s an easy recipe, and I was eating it over vanilla ice cream within 15 minutes of starting out!

Strawberry and Sage Coulis 

Ingredients:

300g fresh, ripe strawberries
1 tablespoon water
1 tablespoon lemon
2 teaspoons sugar
2 fresh sage leaves

What to do:

1. Rinse and hull the strawberries.

2. Put them in a food proccesor or blender and pulse two or three times. You don’t want a puree here! Just break them up a bit.

3. Chop the sage leaves in to fine pieces. (If you use dried sage, use about a half teaspoon).

4. Combine all the ingredients in a sauce pan and cook over low heat for about 10 minutes. Don’t bring it to the boil. Cook it slowly simply to infuse the strawberries with the sage.

5. Serve hot or cold over ice cream or with another dessert.

Technorati tags: strawberry, sage, coulis, sauce, ice cream

 Few Irish people seem to like marzipan, but I certainly do. Perhaps people don’t like it because most marzipan here is terrible, and finding the good stuff is very difficult indeed. It helps that I have a sister-in-law who is from Lubeck, and brings back Niederegger every time she returns from a visit home.

So I was thrilled when a friend recently showed me a recipe for making it, which I had never done before or even considered. My first attempt wasn’t nice at all - dried out and tasteless, and that got my juices flowing - things not turning out become an irresistable challenge!

So I tested several recipes. The best one I found in terms of method was here. Cooking the ground almonds as directed brings out the flavour, and the egg white keeps it soft. (There are recipes using raw eggs, but I kept away from them, in case I ever wanted to use the marzipan in the shops). 

If you want to try it, a few suggestions:

1. Use half the quantities unless you want a huge pile of the stuff.

2. I ignore cream of tartar whenever I come across it.

3. I found I had to add another half cup of ground almonds because the initial marzipan turned out quite soggy.

4. Make sure your ground almonds are super-fine (I gave mine a whirl in the food processor).

In the end, I had soft, tasty marzipan, which I enrobed in 70% chocolate. Yum!

I do think it could use a bit of extra flavouring, and I’ll play around some more. Perhaps I’ll post a recipe when I’m completely happy with it…

Technorati tags: marzipan, almond, chocolate, recipe 

 We have been serving chocolate and caramel sauce in our shops for the past six years, and I feel we’ve pretty much perfected them. Hot fudge sauce, however, is something that I miss from time to time. It can be time-consuming to make, but it is so tasty that I’ve been considering adding it to the mix. I feel I’m pretty close with the following recipe, and I’ve also worked on a method of cutting the time down for preparation (some recipes take upwards of two hours to make). If you want to try it:

Hot Fudge Sauce

Ingredients:

150g 70% chocolate
100g butter
100g cocoa
300g sugar
150ml cream
100ml milk

What to do:

1. Melt the butter and chocolate in a double boiler over simmering (not boiling) water.

2. Add the cocoa and stir until it is completely integrated.

3. Keep the chocolate mix warm in the double boiler.

4. Combine the sugar, milk and cream in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring until the mixture boils. Remove from the heat.

5. Add the hot milk mixture to the warm chocolate mixture as follows - add one sixth of the liquid, stir until the liquid is completely incorporated, then add the next sixth, stirring again, and continue thus until all the liquid has been added.  

6. It will clump at first, and it may separate, but keep adding a bit of the milk mixture and stirring it in until the sauce is glossy and smooth.

7. Serve the fudge sauce warm over ice cream! 

Note: This makes quite a bit of sauce, but you can keep it refrigerated for a couple of weeks (if you have that kind of self-control!) 

Technorati tags: hot fudge, sauce, chocolate, ice cream, recipe 

 I have been in the mood for fudge, and with David Lebovitz hosting an event based on chocolate by brand, it seemed a good excuse to pull out the Valrhona and go making it, even though I missed his deadline. Why Valrhona? Well, it is my favourite eating chocolate, and it also tastes the best in many cooking applications. So which one? I decided on Caraibe, because it’s dark enough to keep the fudge from being over-sweet and smooth enough to balance the bitterness of the coffee. In fact, eating it, you would never guess that it has such high cocoa content…

Please note - you will need a good thermometer. The temperatures are very important!

Kieran’s Coffee Fudge Recipe

Ingredients:

500 gm caster sugar
250 ml cream
120 gm Caraibe (66%) chocolate
75 ml very strong coffee
40 gm butter

What to Do 

1. Put all of the ingredients in a good, thick-bottomed pan (it shouldn’t be too small, or it’s more likely it will burn).
2. Melt over low heat, stirring until chocolate and sugar are dissolved.
3. Cease stirring, increase the heat, and bring the temperature to 115C.
4. Immediately place the pan in a cold water bath to stop the cooking process (you can use your sink, half-filled with water).
5. Cool until 80C. Beat with wooden spoon until fudge lightens in colour and becomes more solid.
6. Pour into baking tray and cool until the fudge sets.
7. Cut and serve.

Technorati tags: fudge, chocolate, coffee, valrhona, recipe