my mother said i should eat an ice cream cone

I love ice cream so much. Maybe it's that extremely cold food is more exciting, maybe it's that the creamy chillyness is the ideal taxicab to drive a million different flavours to your tastebuds, maybe it's that particular melty smoothness.

Maybe it's that ice cream reminds me of good times growing up. So many of my 'birthday cakes' were a tub of vanilla ice cream sprinkled with Smarties or jellybeans and spiked with sparklers, which were then set alight for extra glamour. Mum would put a scoop of ice cream in a cup and top it up with Coke or Fanta to make ice cream sodas for everyone which I thought was very cool. (Some kids got lovingly baked cakes but not everyone's mum has the foresight to combine Tip Top and gunpowder.)

So... I love ice cream. And one of the best, best, and once more best recipes in the world is one that I'm sharing today. I can't remember where I absorbed it from, it just mysteriously became part of my frozen repertoire. I'd like to say "I absorbed it from my own brilliant mind" but that's just not true. What I did invent was this particular version - a completely vegan, two-ingredient, relatively instant and completely delicious-ful ice cream.

Confession: I don't usually serve my ice cream on a bowl-within-a-plate thing. And I never eat it with second-hand commemorative spoons. It was all done so the photos would look nice. Between that and the precisely situated forkful of risotto last week, this blog has become an offal pit of visual lies! To force some honesty into the situation, I made myself eat that bowl of icecream using only the decorative spoon which has a palm-tree embossed cavity of 2cm. It took roughly forty minutes.

Anyway! That's a lengthy bit of emotional baggage for such a quick recipe. I first made this last year using delicious cream but not only does coconut milk make it vegan-tastic, it also lends a fluttery flavour of its own. How this works is - I think - as the food processor blades reduce the frozen fruit to rubble, the liquid is forced through at great speed, turning it into a kind of instantly frozen puree thing which resembles actual ice cream. It's not perfect - you have to eat it on the spot as it loses its texture if refrozen - and it's not overly sweet, so pour in sugar if you like. I chose blackberries because they were cheapest at the time - the seeds to get in your teeth a bit but between friends it's no biggie, plus their tart berryishness and beautiful colour makes up for any of that.

Blackberry-Coconut Ice Cream

2 1/2 cups frozen blackberries (or other)

250ml/1 cup canned coconut milk (or cream, or yoghurt)

Put everything in a food processor. Add some sugar if you like. Blend. Be warned: it will make a racket. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides and process again till it looks like magical ice cream. Scoop into bowls and sprinkle with coconut if you like (or any kind of sprinkly thing, really).

I'm not sure how many this serves - only you can look inside yourself and find the answer - by which I mean Tim and I finished this but it probably could have been divided between four people. It tastes sparklingly and singularly of the fruit that went into it, with a clean, softening hint of coconut. It comes together in seconds, so if you have a can or two of coconut milk in the cupboard and a bag of frozen fruit in the freezer you're only ever moments from ice cream. Which is a very good feeling. 


Spontaneous dinner party? Spontaneous children appear? Spontaneous vegan children appear? Spontaneous simple desire for ice cream? Sorted.

On Thursday night Tim and I went to the Whitireia Performing Arts School's first year performance of Godspell, a musical by Stephen "Defying Gravity" Schwartz, who wrote the bulk of the music when he was only in his early 20s. The cast themselves on Thursday night must have been around 19 and they were brilliant - there were some beautiful voices, sure, but the humour was sharp and the ability to grab props and change character out of nowhere was fairly mind-boggling. I ended up sitting next to this woman who knew my dance teachers from when I was growing up south of Auckland, miles and miles away from Wellington. Small world, isn't it...It was funny in the intermission, they played a karaoke version of Wicked. You could hear pockets of girls in the audience singing along quietly. In these post-Glee days it's more cute than anything else but a couple of years back I probably would have gone and introduced myself with a qualifying "Oh my gosh you know who Idina Menzel is".

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Title via: The philosofly girl Coco Solid in another incarnation as Parallel Dance Ensemble with their song Weight Watchers, which won best video at Handle The Jandal awards last year. I was there - imagine those donuts and psychedelic licorice allsorts writ large across the Embassy cinema screen in psychedelic colours. Lip-smackingly delicious both to watch and listen to.

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Music lately:

Michael Franti and Spearhead, Sometimes, from their 2001 album Stay Human. Nice as this song is, I love the acoustic version, although the fact that I learned a dance to it at a workshop a few years back may have cemented it in my mind - sometimes it's impossible not to love the music you learn dances to, no matter how bad. Not that this is bad. This is gorgeous.

By My Side from the aforementioned Godspell. We used to sing this in choir sometimes, it's satisfying for an alto like me. Such a beautiful, beautiful song, I can't believe it was the pretty but abrasively earnest Day By Day that instead made it onto the Billboard charts when Godspell came out in the 70s. The video I linked to is the film version featuring an astonishingly good-looking young Victor Garber as Jesus. (FYI, he's in the Superman tshirt). The harmonies aren't as clear as I'd like but it's one of the better versions available on Youtube. Plus, Victor Garber, hello!

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Next time: I think this is the third time I've put off the Grumble Pie. With a name like that I can't keep denying it a blog post...