Trying out Bip's Christmas Presents

This year, my Sister Bip wished for an ice cream maker, which she got and so after freezing the bowl for some 24 h, tonight we were ready to try it out.

Unfortunately she'd planned to improvise a recipe and had hoped that my Mum and I would have enough know-how to help out, but we've never had an ice cream maker, so we ended up googling for something quick and easy, bearing in mind that the maker would need to churn for 30 minutes or so.

What she found was this (in Swedish). It is a vegan recipe, so both yoghurt and cream were soy based and from a particular brand and the yoghurt was bilberry flavoured. We didn't have that particular brand and flavour of yoghurt, nor the cream, so we used what we had instead, as you'd normally do. This wasn't entirely good, we really should have read the whole blog entry. Still, here goes.

Ingredients
Makes about 900 ml
3 dl soy yoghurt natural
250 ml oat-based whipping cream alternative
1 tsp lemon juice
3 tbsp icing sugar
2 dl frozen bilberries
1 dl chopped walnuts

Method

1. Stir together yoghurt, cream (no need to whip it first), lemon juice and icing sugar.
2. Run in an ice cream maker as per manufacturer's instructions.
3. After about 5 minutes of churning, add the berries and nuts, then let churn until the ice cream is ready.
4. Transfer to a plastic box with an air tight lid and keep in the freezer until needed.

Now the original recipe didn't contain any sugar, I realised that there wasn't any and we added it shortly after we'd started up the ice cream maker, it kind of incorporated OK, but we only added 2 table spoons and one more would have been good. Reading the original blog entry, it comments that the bilberry soy yoghurt was watery and very sweet to eat, in fact sugar had been second in the list of ingredients, which is why the blog writer suggested using it for ice cream instead, so that the sweetness is toned down.

Bip's second Christmas present was a silicone mould for breadsticks.



It was from me, so I got to try it out, while Bip was making the ice cream. Here, I'd read the booklet that came with the mould, so I felt fairly confident that it would work. The only thing I was a bit disappointed with was that the booklet stated that it contained 30 delicious recipes, but I could only count 8. The website did have some, but they weren't too easy to find. I made the basic sweet breadstick recipe to use together with the newly made ice cream.

Ingredients
Makes 78
40 g natural soy yoghurt
40 g vegetable oil
1 medium egg
75 g granulated sugar
65 g wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
Oil or melted butter for greasing the mould

Method

1. Stir together all ingredients to a thick-ish batter,
   then transfer to a piping bag.
2. Grease the mould, then cut a small hole in the piping bag and pipe the breadsticks. The batter makes "two and a half moulds", i. e. 30 + 30 + 18.
   
3. Place the mould in the microwave oven, set it to half strength or nearest below and bake for around 5 minutes. For the oven I used, I set to 360 W for 6 minutes, which resulted in some of the breadsticks burning a little and some not going crispy, but on the whole very tasty.
   
   For the last 18 sticks, 3 minutes would have been enough, but I set it to 4 and a half and burnt them almost to the point where it was tempting to throw them away.

So, we had yoghurt bilberry ice cream with sweet and crunchy breadsticks, which was really nice, though I would have preferred the ice cream to be a bit sweeter.

Of course I won't be able to repeat these recipes, at least not the breadstick one, the ice cream could be made without a machine, but instead freezing in a bowl and stirring through once an hour for 6 - 7 hours until ready. In this case, the cream should be whipped, it'll help make it fluffy. I've made such ice cream before and it can be done, but takes time and patience, that's the tricky part.