17 December 2010

Festive ice cream


These are my Christmas gifts for my co-workers at the library (it's OK, I don't think they read this blog, so it should still be a surprise!). I decided to make ice-cream for them this year. With a North American flavour.

The orange-coloured layer at the bottom of these pots is pumpkin pie ice cream. I roasted my pumpkin at the weekend and it produced about five pounds of purée. Mike suggested that my colleagues might like it as ice cream. A quick hunt online found a few recipes, including this custard-based one which was what I used as the foundation for my version. I drained the purée in cheesecloth in a sieve for half an hour or so, first, as pumpkin can be quite watery. The other departure from the recipe was to stir in pieces of crystallised ginger to the finished ice cream (an idea from one of the other recipes I found).

As you can see, the pumpkin pie ice cream didn't really fill the five containers, so I needed to think of something else for the top layer. Originally, I was just going to do vanilla, but then it occurred to me that it wouldn't take much to turn vanilla ice cream into egg nog ice cream. Just a bit of nutmeg, cinnamon and a generous slosh of brandy, in fact. Tastes pretty good. There's some left over and I think it will be great as a topping on my Christmas pudding. A mix of Old and New World. How apt.

4 comments:

Diana Studer said...

I wonder will you tell us what they said? Can't imagine either flavour from South Africa! But the custard based ice cream will surely be to die for ;>)

Esther Montgomery said...

It sounds like the kind of recipe that either works wonderfully well or wonderfully not well. I think they'll be impressed!

Esther

Quinn said...

Wow!! Your co-workers are very lucky people!

Northern Beauty Seeker said...

Sounds heavenly. Your colleagues are very lucky. :)