Friday... time to make ice cream

A tea cup is perfect for serving ice cream and now I have the
perfect  excuse to buy more beautiful little tea cups.

So we started a very sweet tradition here, making ice cream to welcome the weekend. 

Of course, I know that lots of the ice cream at the supermarket is absolutely fine for a gluten free diet, but I stumbled across the most simple and delicious ice cream recipe on Pinterest.  I'm not linking to one particular version here because there are so many of them.  Instead, I'm sharing my version of it. 

It starts with just two ingredients, a 300ml pot of double cream (not the extra thick stuff, just regular double cream) and a standard 397g tin of condensed milk.  Don't stress if the ones you buy are a slightly different weight/volume.  This isn't one of those precise recipes.  This is a what-have-I-got-in-the-cupboard kind of a recipe.

Whisk the double cream to soft peaks.  Mix the condensed milk with your other liquid ingredients and then mix that gently into the double cream.  Add your other ingredients and mix gently.

Resist the urge to eat more than a little scrape of the bowl and spoon it all into a plastic tub.  Freeze for at least 6 hours.  You can churn it if you like and you have the equipment, but it doesn't add anything except perhaps to speed up the freezing.

Now for the best bit, adding flavour.  So far, we have made peanut butter ice cream, Nutella ice cream, lemon meringue ice cream and mint choc chip ice cream.

For peanut butter ice cream:
Add about a cup of peanut butter and a tablespoon of golden syrup to the condensed milk.  Add a couple of chopped up Snickers bars (chop them quite small) and some chocolate chips at the end.  We added in Cadbury Caramel Buttons too and it was beyond delicious.

For Nutella ice cream:
Just mix about a cup of Nutella with the condensed milk.  That's it.  If dietary restrictions allow, I imagine this would be incredible with smashed up Ferrero Rocher in it.  We can't have them but I like to think of someone out there scoffing it on my behalf.

For lemon meringue ice cream:
Add about half a jar of lemon curd (I used Sainsbury's Taste the Difference) to the condensed milk.  Add smashed up meringue (I used 4 regular nests from the supermarket) at the end.  Put a third into your tub, swirl over some more lemon curd, repeating twice more with the remaining ice cream.  Sprinkle over another smashed meringue.

Lemon meringue ice cream, ready for the freezer.

For mint choc chip ice cream:
Add 1 tablespoon of peppermint essence to the condensed milk.  If you like it green, add a few drops of green colouring as well.  Add a couple of crumbled Flakes and about half a box of finely chopped mint Matchmakers at the end.

And please, don't be limited to the flavours we've had time to try.  If salted caramel hits the spot for you, stir some in.  If you crave chocolate ice cream, melt some milk or dark chocolate as preferred and stir in the condensed milk.  And don't forget cookie dough, vanilla choc chip, honeycomb... so many flavours to try.  Up next for us is raspberry ripple and Bounty bar coconut and chocolate.  Yum.

This week

First of all, happy Mother's Day to any mummy readers in the UK. I hope you're having a lovely day with lots of cuddles and cups of tea (the cuddles are the best bit for me, and Little Miss Pink has taken it upon herself to keep 'em coming).  How lovely would it be if all those cups of tea arrived in something as pretty as this?

Sadly sold, but MariasFarmhouse has lots
more lovely teacups to choose from.

Doing: This week I've been decluttering.  I read about the 40 bags in 40 days challenge, although I've managed to lose the link to the blog I found it on.  The idea is that for the 40 days of Lent you remove one bag of clutter each day.  I think real devotees focus on specific areas and have checklists and so on.  I've just taken the idea and moulded it to suit me, so it's more a motivation to get rid some of the stuff that really I don't need any more, and I can give myself a pat on the back each time something else leaves the house.

Reading: I'm hugely inspired by the Little Pincushion Studio.  Annabel Wrigley teaches children to sew and is converting a camper van into a mobile sewing studio.  Jealous?  Me?  Absolutely!  I'm wondering how I can persuade Mr V&B that a caravan on the driveway would be the answer to the sewing clutter loveliness that spreads itself, completely unassisted, throughout the house.

Watching: I watched The Great British Sewing Bee final.  I love seeing sewing on mainstream television, but it seemed to be a very short series and, watching with the Sewster (she's 12), they seemed to start with more difficult garments than in the past, skipping the more basic stuff that she would have grasped more easily.  That said, it has totally inspired her and I need to keep up the decluttering to make room for all the newly sewn goodness she's creating.

More reading: I picked up a copy of Simply Sewing, the latest sewing magazine here.  Sewster and I both liked it enough to subscribe - Oh Boy has a Beano subscription and Little Miss Pink has Toucan boxes, so I was on the lookout for something for Sewster and this is perfect (especially as I can read it too).  It has the usual mix of pattern reviews, new fabrics and lots of things to make, from simple bags to a dress by Lauren Guthrie.  My only criticism is that they suggest that "Transforming a T-shirt is a great place to start if you're new to dressmaking."  They do qualify that with "Jersey fabric can stretch on the machine, so practise on old tops to get the hang of it" but I don't think stretch fabrics are the place to start and it might well be a huge put off for some people.  Much better to start with a woven cotton, at least in my humble opinion.

Eating: I tried out a recipe for peanut cookies, made with just peanut butter, honey and an egg, which I found, of course, on Pinterest.  I'm not convinced they're the cookies for me, but I'm going to use it as a starting point for a healthier than average cookie.  Watch this space.  The basic recipe was a cup of peanut butter, 1/3 cup of honey and 1 egg, mixed well and baked by the tablespoon at 180 for 8 minutes.

That was my week.  How was yours?