Lime & Coconut Ice cream

Thursday, so it's ice cream making day again! One of my favourite days of the week - at least, when I have a recipe in my head that I've been wanting to make for a while.

I devised this one last week, at the same time as my chocolate coconut ice cream. Mum had been looking for recipes online using coconut and found a Lime Coconut one. I got very excited, as it is one of my favourite cake flavours, but it was one of those recipes that is 'some lime, some coconut, some vanilla ice cream'. And when it comes to ice cream, that is not how I work. I want to make them from the base up. But I had a big hurdle to get over - I use 600mls of cream, and if I add lime juice to that, it is very likely to curdle. And I don't want curdled ice cream. I decided, in the end, to ignore lime juice and just use the rind. I considered making a sorbet, instead of ice cream, but I wasn't really sure how it would go with shredded coconut. Plus, even though I like sorbet (especially in the middle of summer), I love ice cream.

So in the end, I devised the following recipe, and it worked quite well. The limes I used were quite small - as they tend to be here - about 5cm (2inches) in diameter. I *think* I've seen them bigger overseas, but I could have been confusing that. So if 5cm is what you have over there, you're fine.

Rind of two limes.
1/2 cup shredded coconut
395g tin condensed milk
600ml thickened cream.

I grated the rind off the limes, and mixed it with the coconut and left in a sealed container overnight. I was hoping to infuse the coconut slightly with the taste. No idea whether it worked, but the container smelt good in the morning. In the morning, I mixed the cream and condensed milk in a bowl, and then added the coconut/lime rind, and mixed well. I let it chill in the fridge for 30-45minutes, and then just poured it into my ice cream maker. I was a bit concerned at first that it had curdled, but I think that was just coconut.

And the result was a nice, creamy, lime flavoured icecream. With coconut. It was really quite good - though right now, I am feeling extremely full. The lime was just right (for me, anyway), not too overpowering, but strong enough to be noticeable.

Now, I just have to figure out a flavour for next week...

Chocolate coconut ice cream

Today was another experimental ice cream day. I admit, I experiment with ice cream more often than not these days. When I started, I did follow recipes, and I have made some very delicious things, like this cheesecake ice cream but my plan was always to find a basic ice cream vanilla mix and go from there. And I got lucky, because a few years ago I bought a Nestle Recipe book. One of those ones you get free with a magazine, or something. And it has a few ice cream recipes in there - including my basic cream + condensed milk combination. But it has other things, so when I have an ingredient I want to use, I check it out and see if it has any hints about quantity.

For today's ice cream, I had to look up two different things - how much chocolate to use, and how much coconut, and from there I developed the following recipe:

395g tin condensed milk
600ml thickened cream
200g milk chocolate (I just used Woolies Select)
1/3 cup shredded coconut.

Melt the chocolate over water, mix in the coconut, allow to cool (I probably should have left it longer than 5 minutes, but it still worked), and then mix in the condensed milk and cream. Chill (in my case, for an hour) and put into ice cream maker.


My ideas for ice cream come from strange places; I often just think "what flavours do I like together" and then mix them up and see. But today's came about because my mother bought the wrong sort of coconut for her anzac biscuits. She always uses desiccated, but she accidentally bought shredded. She tried them in the anzacs, and they were okay, but the texture was weird. So she told me to use the coconut. And, because it's me, my first idea was "I'll put it into ice cream!". And I really liked that idea, but thinking about it some more I wasn't sure I wanted an entire coconut ice cream, so I decided to break up the flavour and, being a total chocoholic, I decided to add chocolate.  Very simple, and allowing me to end up with an ice cream rather Bounty in flavour! Which is excellent, because I love Bounty bars.

And now, it just leaves me free for more coconut-inspired ice cream next week.