The recipe: p222, "Ice Cream Cake"
Now now, don't roll your eyes and give up on me already. I understand that part of the appeal of Random Kitchen - perhaps even the bulk of the appeal - lies in the terrible and ludicrous things I end up having to cook and eat. As such, an ice cream cake might seem disappointingly tame. Pleasant, even. But this is Nigella we're talking about. Last time round she gave us a tagine that used a whole bottle of wine and no stock and a chowder that tasted of self-defence weaponry, so there's no telling how she'll manage to mangle even a straightforward treat like this.
As the finger of fate lands on this particular dessert, it strikes me that I don't really know what an ice cream cake is. I mean, obviously the clue is in the name to an extent, but I have visions of something like... a cheesecake, perhaps, with a biscuit base and a layer of ice cream on top? The photograph in the book suggests an even simpler beast, however, with "cake" referring to the shape as much as anything else. I suppose you get cakes of soap, after all, and it's not like they come with a layer of digestive crumbs unless something's gone very wrong at the factory.
The prep: I'll say one thing - this is a most useful choice for the first week of a lockdown project. If I'd been tasked with tracking down obscure Italian cheeses or a serrated bundt mould while minimising unnecessary journeys, I might have had a low-key strop and abandoned this project before it even began. But vanilla ice cream and a bunch of stuff to go on/in it? That's something even the Asda in Lewisham can manage.
In fairness, at no point does Nigella say that the ice cream has to be vanilla. It's implied by the photographs and the general concept, though, so that's what I go with. Similarly, there's no real consensus as to what I should be using for most of the other ingredients. "You can choose different biscuits, different nuts and nobbly bits to mix in", the recipe says - and that's probably for the best given that one of the suggested ingredients is something called "Nestlé swirled milk chocolate and peanut butter morsels", which:
The internet suggests that this is an American product - v. helpful in a cookbook whose price tag is unquestionably in pounds sterling - so I go with the "chocolate chips of your choice" option instead.
All of this is quintessentially Nigella, somehow managing to complicate what is essentially "stirring some stuff into some ice cream you've bought from the shop". However, it does give me scope in terms of catering for Sam's aversion to peanuts, so it's not all bad news.
The recipe also requires one or more hot sauces, the ingredients for which are miraculously all to be found in my cupboards already, as is the springform tin we'll be using once everything's been assembled! Hey, a win's a win.
The making: First things first: while I am, of course, following the recipe slavishly (within the parameters of the options provided), I make a unilateral decision to scale things back a bit. There's no real need for an ice cream cake that serves 8-10 (sorry Sam), especially knowing Nigella's penchant for richness and indulgence, so I end up doing about 60% of what the recipe calls for. My receptacle is a bit smaller than it's meant to be (as the bishop said to the actress), so it should all work out okay.
I leave the ice cream to soften in a bowl while I channel my inner Flo Capp and take a rolling pin to, in turn, a handful of honey-roasted mixed nuts (a sop to minimising the peanut content), a Crunchie bar, and several Bourbon biscuits. Along with the chocolate chips, these all get mixed into the ice cream once they've been smashed and smushed. At first this process seems like it's going to be difficult - you don't want the ice cream to melt too much, as it'll end up all crystallised and gritty when you refreeze it, but it needs to be soft enough to actually take on board what you're trying to stir into it. Eventually, though, working the ingredients in with a couple of spoons produces something with the malleable properties of a wet dough, and it turns out to be similarly satisfying to work with. Even if it does look a bit like coronation chicken.
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| Floured bap, anyone? |
The springform tin is lined with clingfilm (bottom and sides) and the ice cream mixture is added. At this stage, we have at least progressed from "baked potato filling" to "fruit cake" in the appearance stakes.
The top of the "cake" is then smoothed with a spatula and into the freezer it goes, until it's ready to be eaten! (Not a great deal later, it must be said. Working with ice cream and chocolate gives you quite the appetite for ice cream and chocolate.)
Carefully extracted from the tin and placed on a plate, it actually looks all right. The cling film marks down the side are a bit inelegant, but they're there in the photo in the book too, so they would appear to be unavoidable. If there's one criticism, it's that my version of the cake does look a bit squat, but that'll be because I cut down on the quantities. And let's be honest, it's going to be plenty rich as it is.
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| Looks worryingly like it ought to |
It needs 5-10 minutes to soften before it'll slice easily, so I sprinkle some more chocolate chips and biscuit shards over the top as per the recipe, then use the remaining time to quickly prepare what Nigella describes as the "crowning glory" - not one, but two hot sauces to dribble lazily over the top (her filth, not mine). And I do mean "quickly" - the butterscotch sauce at least involves two steps, but the chocolate sauce is literally some dark chocolate, double cream, Camp coffee and golden syrup melted together simultaneously, and the result is... well, let's be generous and call it gloopy. Even heated extremely carefully, the double cream in particular means it ends up closer to a seriously rich chocolate mousse more suited to being applied with a trowel than anything you could dribble, drizzle or drool.
The first line of this recipe reads: "I don't think a cook's job should be to deceive". I'll say no more.
The butterscotch at least resembles a sauce, however, so I get to dribble it on just the way Nigella likes it.
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| One sauce, one cement |
The eating: I mean, obviously it's pretty good. Like with every Nigella recipe I've encountered to date, the problem is there's just TOO MUCH of everything.
I recently re-made the sausage, halloumi and pepper dish from the original Random Kitchen with half as many sausages, minimal added oil and a ton of brown rice to offset the excess, and it was so much better that way. Similarly, the chocolate chips or equivalent here, both in and on the "cake", are superfluous when you've already got some nice chocolate biscuits in there, and there's really no need for more than just the butterscotch sauce, crowning glory or not (especially since that particular sauce is seriously good in its own right).
Sam ventures the opinion that vanilla ice cream with the other ingredients strewn on top would be no less nice, and he may have a point. I do think the texture makes this worth the effort, but it's not like you can't buy ice cream with stuff in it these days (someone needs to introduce Nigella to two gentlemen called Ben and Jerry, for a start).
If I was making it again (and let's be honest, I probably will), I'd throw in at least another Crunchie bar, go easy on the chocolate chips, and definitely not bother with the hot chocolate gloop. Indeed, since the recipe offers plenty of wiggle room on the ingredients anyway, I think the best thing to do with anything like this is treat it like Rocky Road in ice cream form - just add the stuff you like best and let the freezer do the rest.
Which begs the question: is that really enough to constitute a "recipe" in the first place? I'm not so sure it is. Still, if nothing else, this experience has taught me how easy it is to make a decadent butterscotch sauce. Which is useful. Dangerous, but useful.
Two-word verdict: Deceptively excessive.
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