This book will make you fall in love with ice-cream making again

A few years ago, with time on my hands, I bought an ice-cream maker. I made vanilla and chocolate and other more unusual flavours like cardamon from a Meera Sodha recipe. It was my equivalent of sourdough. I have nothing against baking, but I knew ice-cream making would be more my thing. I am basically a cat. My guilty pleasure is a bowl of cream. If the cream happens to be frozen, so much the better.

I enjoyed having my special gadget – a chrome Cuisinart ice-cream maker that sat on my countertop like a cement mixer. I experimented with infusions and flavours. The ice-cream I made tasted better and cleaner than store-bought varieties and came with bragging rights. But things got busier, and I stowed it for a rainy day.

Now a new book by Terri Mercieca, the Australian-born, London-based founder of Happy Endings, has prompted me to take it out again. This ice-cream and dessert business founded in 2014 is probably best known for its ice-cream sandwiches. These include “The Naughty One” made with Guinness cake, miso salted caramel and soy dulce de leche, and “The Gay One” inspired by the Aussie frozen treat Golden Gaytime. The latter features in her debut The Happy Endings Cookbook: Desserts That Dreams Are Made Of (Pavilion, £26) alongside sundaes, sticks, bombes and other puddings. 

Mercieca is an ice-cream nerd and revolutionary. “Baking has been getting all the love for far too long, it’s time ice-cream claimed its crown as the ruler of desserts!” she writes in the introduction. Having taught herself the fundamentals, she formalised her education last year by enrolling at the ice-cream school at Penn State University. Making ice-cream is “technical AF”, she says, “a dance of ice crystals, air bubbles, fat, sugar, protein and water”. And yet “making your own is worth every minute”.

Her book is aimed at professionals as well as amateurs and doesn’t stint on geekery. The final section “lifts the lid off” the science behind ice-cream-making with notes on the relative sweetness and freezing point depression factor of various sugars and the percentage of milk solids non-fat in different creams and milks so professionals can originate recipes while balancing sweetness and scoopability.

I am basically a cat. My guilty pleasure is a bowl of cream

Amateurs like me risk going cross-eyed deciphering this stuff and may prefer to put their faith in Mercieca’s recipes, which are no more challenging than intermediate cake recipes. You do, however, have to trust in her use of certain processed ingredients. Her mango passion fruit sorbet, for instance, contains three different kinds of sugar: caster sugar, dextrose and atomised glucose powder. These help lower the freezing point without making the sorbet too sweet and result in a smooth texture straight from the freezer. The recipe also contains citric acid to punch up the flavours and an optional stabiliser to slow crystal development. Such ingredients may be common in commercial ice-creams but rarely figure in kitchen recipes.

One recipe, however, has been created specifically for home cooks. “The Ultimate No-churn Vanilla Ice-Cream” requires no ice-cream maker and contains condensed milk (a staple of no-churn recipes) with evaporated milk, whole milk, double cream, skimmed milk powder and golden syrup. It scoops more easily than others I’ve tried and has a luxurious creaminess without being too sweet.

I also made a malted milk ice-cream and wattleseed caramel sundae, mostly because I’d never encountered wattleseed. The flavour of this Australian acacia tree seed combines chocolate, coffee and hazelnut, and was a revelation, especially when worked into a creamy caramel drizzle poured onto the delicious malt-infused ice-cream.

But no ice-cream proved the worth of putting in the effort more than Mercieca’s cocoa husk and lapsang souchong, made from a vanilla milk ice base (without eggs). First, I had to source cocoa husks, which are not the same as cocoa nibs and typically come as a tea. These impart a more aromatic, floral note than other cocoa products. Then I had to track down lapsang souchong, many varieties of which are now banned in Europe due to health concerns. The process of infusing overnight, reheating, allowing the mixture to cool and mature then freezing took up to three days, at which point I finally got a taste. Each spoonful was like a swirl of cigar smoke or church incense around my mouth chased with iced hot chocolate and whisky cream. I practically purred.  

 @ajesh34