13 November 2011

cooler than ice cream and warmer than the sun...

Mmmhmm. Another ice cream. What can I say. When the vision appears, there's nothing you can do but meet it head on, climb on top of it, and skilfully fly it round like a hovercraft till you can alight upon the grassy knoll of recipe-confidence.

Let that extended metaphor be a red flag that warns you not only of my 3am bedtime last night, but also of increased potential for further extended metaphors. Anyway this ice cream leapt to mind fully-formed, no need for contemplative hovering: Cranberry Curd and White Chocolate Ripple Ice Cream.


Cranberries are pretty synonymous with Christmas food, and if they're not for you they will be after reading books by Nigella Lawson. But I'm a fan any time of year, despite their kinda maligned image. They're not as give-it-to-you-on-a-plate sweetly juicy as strawberries, not as popular as raspberries, not as purple as boysenberries and their medicinal purposes aren't as dinner-table-conversational as blueberries. In fact cranberries are like the grapefruit of the berry world: sour, prone to bitterness, with connotations of...groin. Luckily Nigella Lawson's here, with her recipes for cranberry sauce and cranberry stuffing and all kinds of good Christmassy things, to save the cranberry's image.



I've gone one further, and taken one of her more interesting recipes - Cranberry Curd - and turned it into an ice cream, where swirls of frozen whipped cream whirl around slashes of crimson. A beautiful vortex, like holly berries on snow...that have been prodded at and moved around with a stick...the harshness of the berries muted with sugar, eggs, and butter; the plain cream embiggened by the gorgeous colour and the still-remaining hint of sourness, as well as the frozen, buttery crunch of white chocolate (Whittakers - my favourite and what I almost always use. Just enter the name into the search bar for proof...) While you can make this any old time, the colours and the frozen nature of it and the fact that I'm making it in mid-November means it's ideal for a yuletide pudding. Especially since December is summertime in New Zealand. Although if I had a glazed ham for every December 25th that was either coldly rainy or airlessly humid...


The method looks really long and complicated but there's nothing to get uncomfortably nervous about - apart from a particularly brutal sieving segment, the cranberry curd is delightfully untemperamental - and then you just half-heartedly whisk some cream, mix them together, admire the swirly prettiness like it's your 6th form art board and you're impervious to criticism, then let the freezer do its thing. My advice is to go slowly and calmly at all stages. I was on some kind of clumsiness roll and ended up doing many stupid things, like flinging cranberry curd everywhere and getting cream in my hair and wailing about curd on my tshirt before realising there was a slowly descending splodge of cream that had been there for even longer. Oh, and accidentally dropping all the remaining cranberries out of the sieve into the carefully strained mixture below. And dropping cream on the floor. It was like that scene with McNulty and Bunk in Season 1 of The Wire but with "WHY AM I SO CLUMSY" instead of one specific expletive used as my only dialogue. Mercifully it all ended up okay. More than.


Keeping in with the theme of Christmas usefulness, you could always double the cranberry curd ingredients, jar them up and give them away as gifts. It's exactly like lemon curd but with cranberries, doesn't it make you just want to invent a whole lot of different curds now? Banana coconut curd, raspberry curd, kiwi-strawberry curd...

Cranberry Curd White Chocolate Ripple Ice Cream

500ml/2 cups cream
3 tablespoons sugar
100g or so white chocolate, roughly chopped (I used Whittakers

Cranberry Curd:

250g cranberries (straight from the freezer's all good)
100ml water
200g sugar
100g butter
3 eggs 


Bring the cranberries and the water to the boil in a small pan till the berries are softened and have released their juices. Now comes the one horrible job. You have to try push all this through a sieve into a bowl. There's a technique - go slowly, keep pressing down and stirring with a spatula and then scraping the underside of the sieve with that spatula. You should end up with around 1/3 cup cranberry matter and a permanently clogged sieve. From here it's simple though. To the strained, velvety pink liquid add the butter and sugar and gently melt over a low heat, then beat the eggs and sieve them into the pan while stirring (ordinarily a pain but you've already got a dirty sieve, so?) continue to stir over a low heat until it has thickened a lot. Don't let it overheat and curdle after all that trouble - if you suspect shenanigans, just remove it from the heat and keep stirring. Allow to cool. Stir in a few daring drops of red food colouring if you like - this particular time I did.


Meanwhile, whisk the cream till it has thickened and has increased in body mass but isn't at the point where you'd call it whipped. Fold in the shards of white chocolate, and spatula all this into a freezer-proof container. Tupperware lunchboxes like the one I've used here are perfect.


Ripple technique: I worked this out on the fly, as the spoonful of curd hovered questioningly over the container of whipped cream. Firstly, spoon the curd into the container of whipped cream in three rough horizontal lines (across the width, like a bumblebee) then take the handle of a spoon or a skewer or something, and make lines up and down across the length of the container, through the stripes. From here, carefully swirl all this around till you're happy. Just remember you can't un-swirl, so go slowly and carefully.


Freeze. 


All these surrounding ingredients really truly mellow out the cranberry, leaving it velvety and intriguingly sweet and berryish without any of that mouth puckering, tooth-coarsening quality that you might expect. The stripe method of swirling means everyone's guaranteed a decent portion of sherbety cranberry ripple to dissolve, and white chocolate is so delicious that I almost don't want to demean it by explaining why it's there, but its rich sweetness works perfectly with the ingredients and lends an alluring crunch to all that smoothness. I'm proud of myself for this one.


So I'm super tired because it has been a big weekend of activity, from a raucous book group on Friday night followed by a catch up with a friend at Havana, Saturday's plans for mini-golf were dashed upon the raindrops, but we all went to Denny's and ate a whole lot of food (including a proper coke float) and followed it up with a Whisky Appreciation Evening that carried on long after the night had turned into the next morning. That's what weekends are for, but now my brain's feeling a little frantically underslept - if nothing else I can lean on this container of ice cream, cool my fevered brow, and spoon it into my mouth while I'm at it with but a minimum of effort. Just like the ice cream itself. I feel like it's not too early to start thinking about Christmas-related things, but if you do, then maybe come back and re-read this post in three weeks so you can absorb it more comfortably?
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Title via: Eurythmics, Who's That Girl - so our Whisky last night was Scottish, but I didn't realise babein' Annie Lennox was too. This song doesn't encroach on Thorn In My Side's Favourite Eurythmics Song territory, but it's still damn good.
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Music lately:

Mos Def, Rock'n'Roll. I absolutely love Jack White, truly, but I was a little surprised he didn't get mentioned in this song.

Underworld, Rez. So twinkly and light and gratifyingly endless.
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Next time: I started making progress on a Christmas Cake today. Would've actually made it but was far, far too sleepy. More fool me...

20 comments:

  1. the horrible job. at least they are not cherries, and don't have pips. i tried making fruit leather with 2kg of otago cherries. worst idea ever. the straining was a nightmare. it felt like my kitchen had turned purple, and all my baking paper was covered with pools of dark purple leather in varying stages of cooked. shudder.

    i might make a vegan version with more of a cranberry coulis as opposed to a curd ?? .. hmm!

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  2. oh please, just marry me already. (haha I'm sure you get marriage proposals all the time, but I assure you I am a more than adequate candidate :P )

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  3. Hovercrafts and grassy knolls, tee hee! That cracked me up a little bit. I really can't enjoy white chocolate unless there's something nice and sour (cranberries!) or salty (pretzels!!) to go with it. Well done, this looks beautiful.

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  4. Looking at the swirls in your ice cream reminds me I wanted to bake a specific cheesecake.
    Your ice cream is just perfect for today's sunshine ! Really want to grab the spoon and dig in !

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  5. Don't you just love how Nigella gets us all worked up and into the Christmas spirit? Your post reminded me to get Feast out and make her Easy Action Christmas cake... the easiest and most amazing fruitcake ever. I think it would be pretty amazing with a scoop of your ice cream.

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  6. Soooooooo delicious looking! This ice cream has stopped me in my tracks. It's one of those recipes where it gets better with each word (ie cranberry, ice cream, white chocolate...)!
    PS: I have hinted at How to Eat for Christmas, based on your rave reviews, by the way!

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  7. Laura this icecream is SO beautiful! I am thinking of trying to make it for family Christmas...

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  8. Feijoa-pomegranate curd, salted-caramel-plum curd, persimmon-sprinkles-curd, persimmon-sprinkles-curd-turned-into-ice-cream-with-hot-peanut-butter-fudge-sauce...

    I'm always proud of yo'self, Laura. Forever'n'ever amen! Even if I wouldn't be very good at a Whiskey Appreciation Evening. I'd take a sip, screw up my face, take a bigger sip, screw up my face, hand the not-empty glass back, and then go dance on the coffee table like a lemur.

    xoxo

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  9. I am a huge fan of cranberries (and of Nigella), and this looks like a beautiful christmas recipe...

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  10. mmm, it looks so good!

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  11. Your ice cream is just perfect for the season. It looks and sounds delicious. This is my first visit to your blog, so I took some extra time to browse through your earlier posts. I am so glad I did that. I really like the food and recipes you share with your readers and I'll definitely be back. I hope you have a great day. Blessings...Mary

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  12. It looks so beautiful & I love cranberries so festive...one day I will put on the full Nigella Christmas fest ;) Thinking the cranberry curd could be the perfect Christmas gift for my supper club girls so thanks!

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  13. YUM! I want to lick the screen,look at that swirl! Any ideas for a lychee and lime sorbet? The brand I used to buy discontinued the flavour. You've inspired me to have a go now.

    (Love your blog!)

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  14. Thank you SO much for bringing this ice cream along tonight! My stomach hasn't exploded yet despite my 'one little spoonful' turning into about four.

    I couldn't help it, so fraking good.

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  15. Funny. I love trying out different curd recipes, and last weekend I had a potentially genius epiphany to make a tangerine meringue pie for Thanksgiving next week out of tangerine curd.

    But cranberry meringue would be a bit more seasonal.... do you think it would be flavorful enough to star in a pie?

    I don't know how you make such a mess out of your kitchen endeavors all the time. I'd pay to watch all of those unfortunate events happen in a row;)

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  16. cranberry curd, love the sound of that one. On ya Nigella :-)

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  17. The ice-cream looks AMAZING!!!

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  18. So delighted to have stumbled on your site. And here is a tip that I think you might enjoy. A food mill. In the states it is sometimes called a Foley, a Mouli(moulineaux), in France(brand names). I will be using your recipe tomorrow, and the food mill will efficienty and easily extract the juice leaving the skins and seeds behind. I make a smooth tomato sauce by cutting off the ugly bits and cooking gently until soft. No need to core, seed and peel. Globe artichoke soup is a bit more of a bear. Cook scrappy bits saving the beautiful heart. Leaves and stems cooked for a very long time; a trip to the food processor in appropriately sized batches. With plenty of stock, send the ugly mess to the food mill. Turn the handle and a smooth puree exudes. This machine was so cheap years ago. No longer. Do you have thrift stores in New Zealand? Anyway, find one. Invaluable.
    Regards,
    Charlene Cottam from Atlanta, Georgia, USA

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  19. OH MY GOD, that looks amazing, will definitely have to try it

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  20. This looked so good I had to make it!
    I used the Whittakers L&P white chocolate (love that stuff). I noticed after whipping the cream that the recipe doesn't say when to add the sugar (unless I missed that line?) so I added a couple of tablespons of icing sugar at that stage.
    The cranberry curd was delicious and made heaps so I left some out to have on french toast with strawberries :)
    Thanks for the beautiful recipe!
    Hannah

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