For Christmas last year Jules got Sandra this Ice Cream making machine. As with all things new for the first couple of months they both expressed an enthusiasm for the machine which sounded like they were making use of it nearly every couple of days – mainly making frozen yoghurt I think. Sandra invited me over this weekend to try and make Delia’s Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream which she describes as half dessert half ice cream.

But before work comes sustenance and today it came in the form of a delicious chicken pie from the markets that Jules and Sandra visit most weekends. Yummo!

We started making the ice cream at about 2pm. Steps included pureeing strawberries and making a syrup, crumbling and baking the crunchy bits, making the custard base for the ice cream, combining with curd cheese and yoghurt ready for freeze-churning in the ice cream maker. This only took 45 minutes to get to this stage. The freeze-churning stage took about half an hour to chill the machine and nearly another half an hour to freeze churn.

Then it was time to quickly fold in the strawberry puree and the crunchy bits. I think we ended up with too much strawberry puree because they ended up being less ripples and more strawberry flavoured ice cream! (Did anyone notice in the photos that I’ve switched to sweats! Heh heh. Sweats with maximum expansion to fit in all the food I was expecting to eat today.)

Delia suggests that you need to freeze the whole mixture for 5-6 hours! 3-4 hours actually was enough for us and just enough time to watch a movie and for Sandra to make us some dinner – lasagne! Delicious lasagna!

So the finished ice cream product looked like this coming out of the freezer. Okay – at fist glance it doesn’t look fab (in fact Jules commented that you couldn’t tell looking at it whether it was savoury or sweet! Cheeky! Ha ha!) but once served it started to look like the genuine thing.

Taste-wise it was pretty good though it was a lot less creamier than I was expecting it to be. We might try rocky road next time …