From a clapped-out Kenwood Chef, bought by my mother-in-law sixty years ago in Aden, comes Nigella’s new instant coffee ice cream.
It turned out to be even easier than it looked on the telly. I’d bought the wrong size of condensed milk, so ended up with enough to double the recipe. No real hardship as it allegedly keeps for a month in the freezer. I didn’t even need to measure the cream, but just poured the whole tub into the machine. We didn’t have any elegantly bottled espresso liqueur in the house (but then again, we never do) so I just went the pleb route of substituting Kahlua.
At the soft peak stage the mixture was far more sickly latte than espresso hit – as predicted by the Great Goddess herself. Hopefully the freezing will knock back the cloying condensed milk and bring out the coffee hit.
Since Nigella shared her first religious gelato experience, I thought I’d do the same. I was seventeen, and with my friend Mary Hughes, on a school trip to NYC. We’d snuck out of the hotel one night to go wild. A daring sloe gin fizz or two later, we ended up a late-night corner shop somewhere in Greenwich Village. It was here I first discovered Haagen Daz. I chose the coffee, and as we stood outside on the pavement eating our ice cream from the tubs with those plastic spoons that come stuck to the lids, I remember thinking, how grown up are we?!
Coffee ice cream has been one of my favourite things ever since although, in truth I’ve yet to find a recipe which tastes so sweetly of freedom as that first one did.
UPDATE: I’m disappointed with the results. The taste is okay, nothing exuberant. Another time I’d re-double the coffee and the booze. But the texture is more like a parfait, the sort of thing which I’d expect to have been frozen in a loaf tin and then sliced.
