Lemon and Meringue Ice Cream

I'm in the process of tidying up the digital part of my recipe collection and I came across another Mary Berry recipe, this time for a lemon and meringue ice cream.

I do intend to one day buy an ice cream maker, but not yet, so I haven't ventured into ice cream making too much. But this recipe seemed quite easy to do, so while I was at it with the tarte au citron, I thought I'd try this out as well.

The original recipe can be found here, I was not able to get hold of all ingredients, so my version became this:

Ingredients
300 ml double cream
1 lemon, zest and juice
200 g lemon curd
50 g meringues

Method

1. Whip the cream to soft peaks in a large bowl.
2. Grate the lemon zest into the cream
3. Cut the lemon in half, then place a sieve over a tea cup and squeeze as much of the juice as possible over the sieve. Or use a proper citrus reamer. Just make sure none of the pips end up in the liquid!
4. Pour the lemon juice into the cream, add the lemon curd and stir in well.
5. Carefully break up or cut up the meringues into small chunks and incorporate into the mixture.
6. Spoon into a plastic box with 1 litre capacity. Alternatively use a small loaf tin, but line with cling film first.
7. Place in the freezer overnight. It will go fairly solid, so remove from the freeze for 10 - 15 minutes before serving.

I made this on Sunday and Lundulph and I tried it for afters last night. It was very rich and quite tasty. I started thinking along the lines of maybe doing a citrus trio with a scoop of lemon, scoop of orange and scoop of lime. With home made curd of course. But for the next time, I will not use double cream, but possibly single, if I can get it whipped. According to my kitchen science book, the cream needs to be at least 30% fat in order to whip properly.

I was also worried that the only sugar in the ice cream would be from the meringues and the lemon curd, i. e. not enough especially when frozen and indeed I was right, but it works very well with the lemons. Just the fat that needs reducing.

To conclude, we are well lemon-ed out at the moment.