Ingredients for Ice Cream

Our answer

Forever Summer has many recipes for home-made ice cream (not all of them need an ice cream maker) and the Vin Santo Ice Cream appears on p245. Vin santo is a sweet dessert wine from Italy (a speciality of Tuscany). It is usually made from partially dried grapes, which increases the sweetness. Cantuccini biscuits are almond biscotti and cantuccini is the name often used in Tuscany too. In this region vin santo is often served at the end of a meal with the cantuccini alongside and the cantuccini are usually dipped in the vin santo before eating.

You could turn the ice cream into a zabligone version by using a sweet Marsala wine and it would be possible to use amaretti biscuits - but the dry, crisp amaretti biscuits rather than the soft version.

The Dime Bar Ice Cream appears on p235. The Dime bar is now called a Daim bar and consists of a thin bar of crisp toffee studded with almonds and covered in milk chocolate. It is possible to buy them in many supermarkets around the world and they are also available on-line. Also as it originated in Sweden you can usually find the bars in the Swedish food section of Ikea stores.

Once you are confident with some basic ice cream recipes it is possible to tweak and adapt the recipes to your own taste. However home-made ice cream tends not to keep as well as the store-bought ice creams and they are usually at their best if eaten within a month of making. Once the ice cream has been churned and trasferred to a container you can press a piece of baking parchment (parchment paper) on to the surface of the ice cream before putting the lid on and transferring to the freezer and this will help to reduce the amount of ice crystals forming on the ice cream as it sits in the freezer.