Gin and Tonic Sorbet

The ingredients: mint, tonic water, gin, caster sugar, lemons, water.

Weigh out 200g caster sugar.

Add 250 ml cold water.

Bring to the boil slowly (to prevent crystalisation).

Chop the mint.

Add the mint to the sugar syrup and leave to cool. Then strain.

Juice 6 lemons.

Pour 100 ml of Gin into a jug.

Add 300 ml of tonic water.

Add the lemon juice.

A rather large G&T!

Add to the mint infused sugar syrup.

Leave to cool whilst enjoying a G&T.

When the mix is cool, add to the ice cream machine and churn. Our mixture took about 20 minutes until it was thick and icy.

The finished sorbet. It tastes amazing, cold, refreshing, and both sweet and dry. A perfect sorbet and will make an ideal pallet cleanser course.

taste: 10/10, texture 8/10

Apparently it is possible to add a little gelatin or egg white to the mixture to help it keep its form and colour.

New Ice cream - Cinnamon

Made up a batch of Cinnamon ice cream to accompany a Tarte Tatin using a basic ice cream base and some powdered cinnamon. Tasted excellent but wasn't very attractive due the brown speckle of the powdered cinnamon.

Will certainly make this again but will use cinnamon bark next time to infuse the milk to make it look better.

Ice cream rating 7/10

Churning Adventures on Twitter

You can follow the Chief Churner's ice cream making escapades on twitter!
http://twitter.com/ChiefChurner

Earl Grey Ice Cream

The first in a range of tea flavoured ice creams is Earl Grey, an English black tea with Bergamot.

This ice cream used a basic custard recipe as a base (300ml each of milk and cream, 100g sugar, 4 egg yolks) with the milk infused with Earl Grey teabags. It seemed one teabag was not enough after half an hour, and this continued up to using four teabags and leaving them in while the milk was boiled.

Texture seems to be good and it's firming up in the freezer - verdict and photos soon.

Peanut Butter Ice Cream

The Peanut Butter ice cream made with equal parts crunchy peanut butter and sugar, with 300 ml each of whole milk and double cream made a delicious ice cream with a great texture. A little firmer than the vanilla due to the omission of egg yolks but still soft enough.

Next time, a little more peanut butter to give more flavour and maybe a hint of salt or a little less sugar.

Ice Cream Rating 7.5/10

Ice Cream Ratings

Ice cream Ratings are now given to each ice cream made, they are out of 10 and take into account flavour and texture.

First Savoury Ice cream

We attempted our first savoury ice cream - White Stilton and Apricot. We followed a recipe that suggested crumbling milk into double cream and freeze churning.

It just didn't work - it had little flavour of the cheese and was too dense to be a pleasant ice cream. Effectively just a frozen lump of watered down Stilton. Need to reconsider the base for savoury ice cream.

Ice cream rating: 3/10