We Should Cocoa Challenge #35 - Ice-Cream

This month the We Should Cocoa challenge has us combining chocolate with ice-cream, and with the glorious weather we have had this month it is a very apt choice of guest ingredient. 

I knew straight away I would not be making my own ice-cream as I have yet to make a home-made ice-cream that I thought was worth the effort compared with some of the very good ones that can readily be bought from most supermarkets and stores.

So the question was what dish to choose that combined a bought ice-cream with chocolate other than one of the many ice-cream sundae variations. Well I found my answer while browsing through a recently purchased Mary Berry cookbook, 'Desserts'. The recipe that jumped out was 'Italian Tartufo'.

Now do not let the effortless looking perfection of the recipe book picture deceive you, these, like so many other too simple to be true recipes  will have you swearing like a trooper as you struggle to reproduce something remotely like the picture. But that said it was fun and the fact that mine were wonky and covered in very thick chocolate coating rather than the beautiful thin shell of the recipe really was not a problem. It might have helped if I possessed the large ice-cream scoop referred to in the recipe but I do not so a bit of make do was called for.

You start by soaking some amaretti biscuits in an almond or orange liqueur.

That is the easy bit over with. 

You then have to encase each amaretti biscuit in a 'ball' of ice-cream.
The ice-cream is put in the fridge to soften a little before taking a large scoop and pushing an ameretti biscuit into the centre. Maybe I had used too much liqueur in the soaking or my biscuits were substandard but the 'soaked' biscuit crushed down under the slightest pressure so little chance of pushing it into the ice-cream.

Once the ice-cream bombe is sorted this goes back into the freezer to harden up while you melt down the chocolate along with some butter and golden syrup to create a softer setting shell than you would get with pure chocolate.

I decided to make some chocolate disc bases on which to sit the 'bombes' while the chocolate coat was being added to the top.

Now it was impossible to do the next stage and take a photo at the same time but as best you can you coat the bombes with a thin layer of the melted and cooled chocolate and then quickly get them back into the freezer to set up. If you work quick enough you might be able to get the chopped nut garnish on while the chocolate is still slightly soft but I took too long trying to patch up the holes in my coating and had to just add the nuts as best I could at the end.

So after about an hour back in the freezer they were hard enough to served! The flavour combination was really good and as I was just making dessert for two it was not so much trouble if a bit messy.

The 'We Should Cocoa' challenges are hosted by Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog, and Chele over at Chocolate Teapot. You will find a list of the previous challenges on Choclette's blog.