I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream
One of the simplest pleasures in life is a scoop of ice cream. As a child i was always amazed that my father could practically gulp down a whole soft serve in what seemed to be no more than three large bites. What about toothache? Or brain freeze? Of course, there was only one explanation for his awe-inspiring ability. He had superpowers. He was the strongest, the fastest, the cleverest, the best dad in the whole wide world. Of course he could conquer an ice cream in seconds! Even though i still can’t figure out how he does it, finishing an ice cream in record time remains one of his talents to this day.
In small-town Great Karoo in the 1980s the mercury would rise briskly on a summer day and remain high until well into the evening. Every week we would get R1 pocket money, and many times we would spend it only on sweets and other delicacies. With R1 we could buy 50 Wilson’s toffees, or 5 packets of instant pudding, or 20 packets of chips, or 1 can of condensed milk, but in the summer i liked to add an ice cream to my weekly shopping. There were suckers (ice lollies), which could make your R1 stretch very far, and then there were creamy ice creams with crispy chocolate-like shells, which were not so kind on the budget.
Then one day the whole town gathered on a farm for the annual Sunday School picnic, and the hostess made ice cream. From scratch. By herself. Without a whole factory and all that i had always thought compulsory to produce ice cream. i could not wrap my brain around this for a long time. This ice cream was far beyond anything else i had ever tasted in quality, and to this day i can recall its exact taste.
A few years later i stumbled on this simple ice cream recipe that i still use today as a base for many of my recipes, and discovered that making ice cream is not intimidating at all, although it does take some effort if you don’t have an ice cream machine.
Through the years since my first introduction to ice cream in Johannesburg i have tasted some amazing ice creams and some which might rather have been left alone, and i'd like to share some of our ice cream stories with you.
It took some time to settle on this, and the list may change at any given time in the future, but these are the three most memorable ice creams we’ve had together. Of course, one of them is a gelato in Rome, but the specialty soft serve in Hong Kong and the beachside tropical soft serve in Mozambique caught us by surprise. (Read the whole story here)
i never thought i'd try my hand at one of Hilda’s creations (7de Laan’s wacky chef), but as i was preparing for a cooking competition, she inspired me to try something a little bit off-centre. The results were marvelously amazing and has drawn compliments far and wide. (Read the whole story here)
That-Man actually favours ice cream even more than i do, and his first attempt at making his own batch was a great hit. Combining his love for coffee and ice cream (and considering my sweet tooth with the caramel), he made a mutant ice cream based on our base recipe which is one of the few ways his wife will ever consume caffeine. (Read the whole story here)
Our Mozambique adventure inspired That-Man to create his own creamy mango ice cream variety from fresh mangoes. Do yourself a favour and try this one yourself. It’s almost better than fresh mangoes, and it cools you down better after a hot day outside. (Read the whole story here)
Well, that’s a wrap, folks. Soon we’ll start adding more ice cream recipes, so watch this space!
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