one good recipe: Nigella’s coffee ice cream [a guest post]
[This is a guest post from the North Pole Canada]
It’s been a record summer for heat in Australia. I know that because the weather app on my phone tells me and my friends are going on and on about it on Facebook and Twitter. See, I’m Australian. But I’m not in Australia. Life for my family, at the moment, is on the prairies of Alberta, Canada, where it is rarely (if ever) humid and Extreme Winter absorbs roughly half the year. Christmas Day 2012 had a maximum of -22 C. You heard right. It’s a sorry state for a Queensland girl when her wardrobe boasts more beanies than togs (Canadian translation: I have more tuques than swimsuits).
Hot can be tiresome, but it comes with plenty of upsides: summery cocktails, tropical fruit, BBQs by the pool, fish and chips in the early evening shade at the beach. And ice cream. Flick open any summer issue of your favourite cooking magazine and you’re sure to find a recipe for ice cream, gelato, sorbet, semifreddo, and the like. I’ve laboured to make these desserts from scratch, but only this year (in the middle of the Canadian winter, no less) did I discover this gem from Nigella Lawson: four-ingredient, one-step, no-churn coffee ice cream. That’s almost as many hyphens as ingredients.
Nigella’s coffee ice cream
300 mL double cream
175 gram condensed milk*
2 tablespoons instant espresso powder**
2 tablespoon Kahlua***
(2 500ml airtight tubs or containers)Whisk all the ingredients together until soft peaks form, and you have a gorgeous, caffe-latte-coloured airy mixture. Then fill airtight containers with the mixture, and freeze for 6 hours or overnight.
Serve straight from the freezer.
* If you were restrained — and had enough freezer space — you’d double the recipe, since most tins of condensed milk are ~400 grams. Of course, you could just take a spoon and polish off the remains. I won’t tell.
** Apologies to the coffee snobs, but you’ll have to make an exception for this ingredient. There is no substitute. I tried liquid espresso and it made the final texture icy.
*** Nigella calls for ‘espresso liqueur’. Kahlua is my favourite. You should use yours.(Original recipe source here.)
Categorised as: eat+drink+be merry
Hi Kerryn, interestingly I saw Nigella make this recently on a program that is being aired here and tried it, reasonably successfully. It’s the alcohol that stops it from getting too hard apparently and I guess that is why expresso coffee doesn’t work either, because the water content would cause it to freeze too hard. Nice to think we are making and eating the same recipes on the other side of the world! Love Sue
A splash of tequila and cointreau in the Margarita ice cream, too: http://www.nigella.com/recipes/view/no-churn-margarita-ice-cream-32. A solid reason to stock the drinks cupboard roundly.