Basic ice cream recipe / by Emma Paling McGough

Creme Egg Ice Cream

Ok so this recipe was born out of leftovers, like many good recipes.

Yesterday my daughter and I made some chocolate eclairs with a custard filling and dark chocolate ganache topping. With plenty of both the filling and topping leftover, I was wondering whether they’d freeze and it took me moments to work out they’d both combine to make a great ice cream!

So essentially the custard filling we’d made is a fairly typical ice cream recipe too, if you want to make it you will need: 300ml milk, 50g caster sugar, 2 egg yolks, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 4 tsp plain flour, 4 tsp cornflour, 375ml double cream. And that will make you a basic custard that will go great with anything. Literally.

You will need to:

  1. Heat the milk until almost boiling in a saucepan. Meanwhile, mix together the sugar, egg yolks and vanilla in a bowl, then stir in the flours, a couple of tsp at a time, to a smooth paste.

  2. Gradually whisk in the hot milk, pour everything back into the saucepan and cook over a high heat, stirring constantly, for about 5 mins until thick – it will go alarmingly lumpy but don’t worry, just keep stirring it vigorously with a wooden spoon until smooth

  3. Lay a sheet of cling film directly on the custard surface, then cool and chill

  4. Once cool, whisk the cream until thick, then use an electric whisk to beat the cooled, set custard until just smooth again. Fold in the cream. 

  5. At this stage, it’s ready for any additions you want to put in to flavour your ice cream; fresh fruit, frozen fruit, chocolate (broken up), nuts, sweets. Anything that will freeze well.

  6. Add to an ice cream maker or put into a freezer proof tub and put straight into your freezer (without an ice cream maker you will have to go to the trouble of churning it or raking a fork through it every hour or so until it is frozen solid, this prevents ice crystal forming and ruining your ice cream)

For this ice cream, I added the left over chocolate ganache which had set solid in the fridge (i cut off chunks and added it to the ice cream maker while the paddle was going. For an Easter twist, and also to use up some of the plentiful Easter chocolate kicking around, I added some creme eggs. I’m sure my daughter won’t mind the sacrifice (when she finds out!).