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amateur foodies, blokes cooking, Brandy, dessert, gelato zuppa inglese, Ice cream, trifle ice cream, zuppa inglese
EXT. PUB BEER GARDEN – NIGHT.
I’m having a lop-sided conversation with my good friend Ed on an unspecified evening between Christmas and New Year.
‘What ice cream would you like made if you had any choice at all…?’ I asked him in the haze of a sodden hour.
‘Well, when I lived in Italy in 1970…’
Oh no…
‘… you could go to any corner gelateria and get something called Gelato Zuppa Inglese…’
‘That’s Trifle Ice Cream, Ed…’
‘Yep. And I’ve not had it in this country since…’
So, with Ed and his better half Roz coming round on New Year’s Eve, I duly considered the gauntlet to be thrown down – and wearily picked up by myself.
My first issue was that I had never made trifle before, let alone trifle ice cream, and didn’t actually know where to start. Well I did – t’interweb. The second issue was the in putting ‘Zuppa Inglese’ into the omni-present search engine powered by wilful tax-skippers Google, all that came up was, understandably, recipes for trifle. ‘Zuppa Inglese Ice Cream’ came up with recipes for trifle. ‘Ice Cream Zuppa Inglese’ came up with blogs about… trifle. ‘Gelato Zuppa Inglese’ was a bit more helpful, it came up with recipes for trifle ice cream – in Italian.
Cutting this now drawn out bit of the story short, I managed to translate two or three recipes (and that’s about all there seemed to be) and do what I usually do with finding conflicting recipes for one dish – I took an ‘average’.
Actually, what follows is basically an abandonment of most parts of the various recipes, and an attempt to go my own way. Yeah, wild guessing is fun…
So, I made ice cream in the usual way. (See https://alanwares.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/i-scream/, minus the chocolate, brandy and orange bit, for my usual way of doing ice cream). I froze it initially in a large flat tupperware container in the freezer for about three hours. Fast forward those three hours less about ten minutes, and at this point I finely chopped up some strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. About ten minutes after the three-hours-less-about-ten-minutes point, I took the ice cream out of the freezer and mixed it and the fruit together.
Meanwhile, I took a packet of ‘Lady’s Fingers’ (sold in Sainsbury’s, for example, as ‘Sponge Fingers’)…
… and soaked each one in brandy (regular trifle makers would swear blind to sherry being the liver-wrecker of choice – but I didn’t have any), though Italians use a spicy liqueur called Alchermes. I took the slightly softened soaked sponges and lined the bottom of a dish (one that I was happy to put in the freezer) with them. From there, I deposited half of the semi-frozen ice cream on top, smoothed it out, and added another layer of soaked sponge fingers, then poured the remaining ice cream over that, covered with clingfilm and put back in the freezer.
After another six hours or so of freezing, it should be ready. In this instance, it was. Ed heroically played guinea pig, and declared the dessert ‘excellent’… for what it was. In other words, it was Gelato Zuppa Inglese – like Gelato Zuppa Inglese had never been tasted before.
The principle problem, I believe, was that I’d soaked the sponge fingers in the brandy for about 30 seconds each, when 5 seconds would have been plenty. As a result, the very thirsty sponges soaked up the booze, and deposited it back into the ice cream – and booze needs a much lower temperature to freeze solid than the freezer itself will go.
Result – fruity ice cream, slightly overpowered by brandy. Possible solution – soak sponges for less time.
However, it did taste pretty damn good.
Seeing as it wasn’t really what I’d intended to make in the first place (though to be fair this was mainly guesswork, as I’d never had Gelato Zuppa Inglese before), I guess this concoction might well need a new name.
How about ZUPPA CAKEY FRUIT GELATO – EXTRA ALCHY DOSES…?
I do apologise.