By Jove, the blog is as rusted as the mechanism of our beloved machines. But it still works! I just wish other crankers would write more often. And I wish I could crank with them! When is the next meeting of the ice cream team?

Anyway, I brought the machine home for the Christmas holidays in Auvergne. I thought we would serve gallons of frozen dessert, but due to the huge amount of food already present, we did only one batch. It was still worth bringing the machine!

To go with the chocolate cake of Christmas Eve, the best flavour seemed to be tangerine, light and refreshing seasonal fruit.

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We recently made a batch of Chocolate Gelato that was to be served to a 12-year-old girl. Knowing that the young ones among us are often less keen on super dark chocolate I reduced the cocoa powder to just 1/4 cup, hoping that would please her. Unfortunately it was still “too chocolatey and not creamy enough”. Fair enough. I take criticism and try to learn from it.

A few months ago my ice cream services were won in a charity raffle, and the winner requested a batch of chocolate ice cream for a kids party today. So I’m trying a new recipe that should be less dark and more creamy and will hopefully please the young’uns. Not wanting to completely eschew our tried and tested Gelato recipe, I’ve made some simple modifications. My experience has shown that adding a pint of double cream to a gelato results in a mixture way too thick to freeze so I got a pint of single cream and I also reduced the cocoa powder right down. Continue reading →

While I insist to not have favourites, this recipe is certainly high on my list.

So when my dad sent me a new one-gallon White Mountain freezer for my birthday, I knew how I had to inaugurate the new machine.

We first made Whisky and Honey Ice Cream when we were cycling in the Outer Hebrides and it was certainly an amazing experience to make and eat it in the Standing Stones of Calanish.

I decided to celebrate by making a big batch of Whisky and Honey Ice Cream that I could keep in the freezer and enjoy over a few days. I soon discovered this is the perfect ice cream for storage.

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The goal of the perfect nut ice cream often seems elusive. Despite various efforts we do not seem to have technology capable of grinding nuts to the creamy texture we desire. Fortunately there is no shortage of smooth and creamy peanut butter available and we were able to make a fabulously rich ice cream. It’s important to get high quality peanut butter without any added salt, sugar, or oils. And also make sure it is super smooth. The first tub we bought was sold as smooth but still had some small chunks.

• 1 large egg
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 250 ml double cream
• 450g smooth peanut butter (no salt and no sugar)
• milk

The preparation was roughly along the lines of our traditional family recipe. Since the peanut butter is already super smooth, you don’t need to do a lot of work. (Apart from the usual cranking!)

The texture was perfectly smooth and creamy and the flavour unbeatable. This recipe comes highly recommended.

My normal feeling is that strawberries are best suited to ice cream and raspberries are best suited to sorbet. This recipe confirmed that for me, but it was still a delicious sorbet. I made this Strawberry Sorbet by request for a friend’s birthday. It’s a simple recipe:

• 800g fresh strawberries puréed
• 410g sugar
• 410ml water
• 1/3 lemon

I made less sugar syrup than normal knowing I did not want this to be too sweet. So I dissolved 410g sugar into 410g water. I mixed the syrup with the puréed and strained strawberries and squeezed in a third of a lemon.

Cranked as usual.

It was delicious, not to sweet, and with great strawberry flavour. Still, I prefer it as an ice cream.

Today is Boxing Day, so it’s a good excuse to sit back, relax, and reminisce about ice cream and sorbet flavours from the past year. Naturally a few slipped through the net on Triple Motion, so I’ll do my best to start catching up.

We made Lime and Basil Sorbet many months ago, and it was a delicious and balanced recipe. Here’s what we used:

• 10 limes
• 1 lemon
• 1 big bunch of basil
• the usual sugar syrup (500g sugar dissolved into 500ml of water)

I juiced the limes and lemon and chopped the basil as finely as I could. We then added the sugar syrup until we had 18º on the Baumé saccharometer.

Easy as that. Just put it in the White Mountain freezer and crank!

The texture and flavour were darn near perfection, if we do say so ourselves…

p.s. this recipe was inspired by a dessert served at The Kitchin in Edinburgh last year.

This week end, Dear Old Pat came to visit. Having lived with Peter, he shares our ice cream frenzy, and insisted for doing one batch. No need to say it twice!

I had been wanting to make fig ice cream for a while. I’ve been told this was not a good idea, considering the very light flavour of fresh figs, and the multiple seeds contained in them. But as I’m stubborn, and as figs were cheap on the market, we tried nonetheless.

The Ice book supports the making of a custard to get the best flavour in the ice cream. But custards are long and tedious to make, and the Russell Recipe is so tempting….

Ingredients:
- 1kg of fresh figs
- 1 cup of sugar
- 250 mL of cream
- 2 eggs
- About 1/2L milk

Cook the figs with a few tablespoons of water. Let them simmer until the skin is tender (about 15min). Then blend them, but not too thin (you don’t want to crush the seeds).
Beat 1 egg and a yoke with the sugar. Add the cream. Sieve the fig puree (you can choose to leave a few seeds to keep the characteristic crunch, but do not let them all, it would be most unpleasant), and enough milk to fill the canister.

We went cranking in the street, with 2 other friends. The machine is slowly making its reputation through Paris.

The ice cream was delightful, smooth and creamy. The fig flavour was very light, but nonetheless present. I guess if you want to obtain a strong flavour you have to make a custard, and even infuse fig leaves.

It’s been a while since we’ve made that one, but never too late to write a post!

After the more-than-disappointing lemon ice-cream we made in Carbisdale Castle during our Hebridean trip (the lemon juice curdled the milk, and we ended up with a gross yoghurt-flavoured ice cream… and yet our roommate shouted “It’s the best ice cream I’ve ever had”, in his sleep, in the middle of the night, hu hu…), I needed a better experience with lemon.

I have to say my brother is a huge lemon sorbet fan, he tries them everywhere he can, and his expectations are quite high. When he asked us to make one, pressure was therefore on us…

We followed the recipe from the book “Ices”, that is to say:

-10 lemons

- 750mL of sugar syrup

-250mL water

- 1 egg white

We put the zest of 10 lemon in the syrup, brought it to the boil, then added the juice, and left it to cool. It’s probably better to wait something like 12h, but we did not have time…

The peculiarity of this sorbet is that we opened the machine at mid-cranking to add the beated egg-white. This is supposed to give a better consistency. It’s actually not that hard, you just need another bucket: remove the canister from the machine and open it, then put the ice and water in a separate bucket (otherwise you won’t be able to replace the canister), the replace canister and ice in the machine, and resume cranking!

My brother was not disappointed, and ranked our sorbet among the best ones he had ever tried. It was very strong but not too acidic, and incredibly refreshing. A true success.

There was once a dream of the perfect blueberry sorbet. Deliciously intense flavour, luxuriously smooth texture. Purity in frozen decadence.

Strange that this website began with the story of a failed recipe attempt. But Triple Motion is not simply about successes – these are ice cream adventures, experiments with ingredients and flavours, the never-ending quest for frozen indulgence.

So as was promised back in March, we have come back to achieve a blueberry sorbet worthy of the White Mountain itself. In late Summer, the Scottish highlands are swarming with sweet and tasty blaeberries. While resembling a small version of the American blueberry, the European variety (known as bilberries in England and myrtilles in France) are sweeter with a more intense flavour and dark flesh. Naturally, they should make a better sorbet. But the season is short and they’re generally only found in the wild.

After missing last year’s season, we have been anxiously waiting for a blaeberry report, ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice to rush to the hills and start picking and cranking. Finally, Nick mentioned that his housemates had been picking blaeberries near their farmhouse in Fala, about 30 miles south of Edinburgh. I eagerly phoned Big D and insisted he cut his weekend plans short and hightail it to Scotland.
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We recently made a tangy and creamy batch of raspberry ice cream. I’ve gotten into the habit of doing raspberry as a sorbet, so this was an interesting and thoroughly enjoyable return to a recipe I haven’t done in a long time.

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