Ice-cream Feast

I bake a lot at Christmas and my assigned course for our movable Christmas Day feast is usually dessert. The last few years have seen the weather in Perth get more extreme, the cold is colder and the heat is hotter so it is particularly nice to have something to cool down with during a hot Christmas Day afternoon.

Today I'm making some of my family's favourite Christmas goodies and I'm going to share them with you. These recipes are quite quick to whip up (especially if you can find skinned nuts) and they are almost always the first things I make because they can keep for weeks in the freezer.  Let's begin shall we...


Hazelnut Fudge Ice-cream Layer Cake.

 You will need:
400g Hazelnuts
150g Butter, softened
1C Pure Icing Sugar
3 Eggs
250g Dark Chocolate
1/4C Kahlua or Tia Maria Liqueur
2-3 Litres of good quality creamy Vanilla Ice-cream 


Here's what you do:
Step One:
Heat the oven to 200C and roast the nuts on a sheet tray in the oven for 10 minutes until the skins begin to loosen. Remove from the oven and place a clean tea towel over then a thick towel, this will insulate the nuts and help the skins to come off more easily. When the nuts are cool enough to hold, rub them in the tea towel until the skins come away. Roughly chop about half of the nuts.
Timesaver: Buy your hazelnuts pre-roasted and skinned.

Step Two:
Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until the colour becomes pale. Add the eggs one at a time, beat well. After you add the eggs the mixture will split, but don't worry because it will mix back together when you add the chocolate and Kahlua.

Step Three:
Melt Chocolate by you favorite method (I microwave on 50% for 30 second bursts) and stir with a dry metal spoon until smooth. Stir the warm (but not too hot we don't want to scramble our egg mixture) chocolate and liqueur into the butter mix. Try not to eat all this yummy mixture.

Step Four:
Sprinkle the chopped nuts over the base of a baking paper lined spring form pan. Pour half of the chocolate mixture over the nuts and freeze for 30 minutes.  [You can use any size tin but the smallest I'd use is about 26cmX7cm round. If using a bigger tin you'll just have a thicker ice-cream layer.]

Step Five:
Stand ice-cream at room temperature until soft (I use a 4 litre tub and it takes about 15 minutes to soften on my kitchen counter). Spoon ice-cream over the chocolate layer and press down using the back of a spoon, fill until there is about 2cm of space in the tin. Pour over the remaining chocolate mixture. Freeze for about 30 minutes and then use the remaining nuts to cover surface. You may need to gently press them into the topping. Cover with foil and plastic wrap to keep out frost crystals. Freeze at least six hours before serving.

To serve: Use a platter preferably with a slightly raised edge to contain any melting ice-cream. Remove cake from freezer to counter  for 5 minutes and just before serving gently open the spring to release the pan base, peel back the paper as you slide the cake onto the serving dish. Slice with a sharp knife, serve immediately and return remaining cake to the freezer before it melts away completely. I usually store it back in the spring form tin or in an empty ice-cream container.


Raspberry and Meringue Ice-cream Cake.
 

 You will need:
 2 litres good quality creamy Vanilla Ice-cream
500g Raspberries (use berries of your choice fresh or frozen)
100g Meringue nests

Here's what you do:
Step One:
Line base of a spring form tin with baking paper. I seem to have lost yet another one of these tins so I am showing a regular cake pan lined with two pieces of plastic wrap to help the cake come out of the tin at serving time. Note: this would look nice made in a pudding tin too.

Step Two:
Scoop softened ice-cream into a large bowl. Add berries and gently crushed meringue nests. Stir until well combined. [I don't have a bowl big enough to do this all at once so I usually do this in two batches.]

Step Three:
Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and press gently to smooth the top. Cover with plastic wrap and foil to exclude frost on the surface. Freeze at least six hours before serving. The last pic shows how much is left from 4 litres of ice-cream after both recipes are made.

To serve: Use a platter preferably with a slightly raised edge to contain melting. Remove cake from freezer to counter for 5 minutes and just before serving gently open the spring to release the pan base, peel back the paper as you slide the cake onto the serving dish. Slice with a sharp knife, serve immediately and return remaining cake to the freezer before it melts away completely. I usually store it back in the spring form tin or in an empty ice-cream container.

When I rubbed the skins off my hazelnuts today I made sure I saved them.  I'll add them to some rice hull for a special Christmas temari. Let me know if you try either of these recipes and what you thought.

Enjoy your day.