Whilst planning a dinner party for my fellow food bloggers, I wanted to make something to offset the sweetness of the Salted Caramel Banana Blondie I’d planned for dessert. At the same time, we had a glut of full fat milk in the fridge and I’d wanted to make homemade ice-cream for sometime. It was then a case of finding a slightly bitter ice-cream and a recipe that wasn’t too faffy.

My limited research on ice-cream recipes seemed to identify two main ways of making ice-cream. One is using the custard method, gently heating a mixture of milk or cream with egg yolks (with whatever flavour ice-cream you are making) and the other involving whipping cream (plus main flavour) before going through the churning, freezing process (for which I used an ice-cream maker). I did, however, manage to find a recipe that didn’t use eggs (the banana blondies had eggs in them, so I didn’t want to have the dessert too eggy) and looked to be very straight forward. Not only that, but the recipe was from a chef whose food I’ve really enjoyed, Mark Hix. The full recipe is here.

I couldn’t, however, get hold of the glucose syrup, so was quite happy to come across a light Agave syrup in the supermarket, to use as a substitute (happy as it was from the same plant that’s used to make tequila).

After a couple of attempts of making fairly good looking ice-cream, I couldn’t quite get the bitterness I wanted and the final product was also a bit sweeter than I was looking for. The ice-cream is incredibly rich and chocolatey, but the chocolate I used was probably not bitter enough (70% Valhrona Cao Grande Noir), not to mention the first batch contained double the sugar, due to my inability to break up a rock hard clump of muscovado!