For someone who harps on about not only how much they love ice cream but who also takes such noisy pride in circumventing Big Ice Cream Machine with my no-churn recipes, it had been a shameful and inexcusable year and two weeks between the café brûlot ice cream I posted about in January, and the last ice cream recipe prior. To rescue this claim from the realm of prevarication and braggadocio and worse, mere adventitiousness, I’ve endeavoured to make more ice cream. Maybe next time I can rescue myself from my inability to say a single normal sentence! But also, maybe not.

Now, where the café brûlot ice cream was grown up and worldly, this chocolate fudge ripple ice cream is significantly more approachable.

By “approachable” I mean vanilla-tinted ice cream spilling over with enjambments of chocolate. It looks more complicated than it is — the base is barely-whipped sweetened cream, the chocolate fudge ripple is a cornflour-thickened syrup that is oddly nostalgic in its cocoa-flavoured simplicity, untampered with by actual melted chocolate.

I have no backstory to fabricate here — “chocolate fudge ripple” was just next on my notes app list of potential ice creams (that I regularly replicate by hand in a notebook with the intent of being a ‘notebook person’ only to go back immediately to using my phone notes app) and was borne from a half-assed chocolate sauce I made — to go with the café brûlot ice cream, actually — and the correct notion that it would probably taste excellent frozen. There’s something about a ripple ice cream specifically — the verboten digging for the Mariana trenches of flavour slicing through the vanilla, the abstract-art swirling visuals turning every scoop into an occasion — that appeals, and though chocolate ice cream is excellent, it feels so much more chocolatey when juxtaposed against ribbons of vanilla. But, if you go too hard with the spatula and your ripples turn into a solid wall of chocolate ice cream, it will still taste good, I promise.

And one of the best things about ripple ice creams — aside from the taste — is that they reward the non-machine haver. I don’t know how you’d make ripple ice creams in a machine, frankly I don’t want to know, it’s a market I could do without. This ice cream turns you into an artist, the skewer or spatula your paint brush, creating Lee Krasner mayhem and beauty through the flocculent vanilla.

And if you’re after a ripple effect of ripple ice creams, I recommend my Kiwifruit Ripple Ice Cream, my Jelly Tip Ice Cream and my Black Salted Caramel Ripple Ice Cream.

Chocolate Fudge Ripple Ice Cream

A little involved but reassuringly simple, with just one bowl and one pan and, as per usual, zero ice cream machines required. With three different kinds of sugar this may seem like it’ll be too much but the softening effect of the cream and the dark intensity of the cocoa means you barely taste the sweetness — just pure, chocolate-swirled deliciousness. Recipe by myself.

Chocolate fudge ripple

• 50g butter
• 75g brown sugar
• 3 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk
• 4 tablespoons cocoa
• 2 teaspoons cornflour
• 250ml/1 cup water

Ice cream base

• 500ml cream
• 50g icing sugar
• 4 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1: Start with the chocolate fudge ripple so it has time to cool a little — melt the 50g butter in a wide saucepan and, still over a low heat, stir in the 75g brown sugar, 3 tablespoons condensed milk, and 4 tablespoons of cocoa.

2: Mix the two teaspoons of cornflour into the cup of water — a mini-whisk is useful here to dissolve it completely without lumps — and slowly stir it into the cocoa mixture. Turn up the heat and continue stirring — it will look far too liquidy at first, but as small bubbles appear on the surface it will start to thicken; it will then thicken more as it cools. Stir it for a couple of minutes in this fashion, letting it bubble away gently as you stir it, then remove from the heat and set aside to cool a little as you make the ice cream base.

3: Pour the 500ml cream into a large bowl and add the 50g icing sugar. Whisk until thickened — I find this doesn’t take long at all by hand with the added sugar — you don’t want it stiffly whipped, just robust enough that when you trail the whisk through it leaves faint lines, and when you lift the whisk soft peaks of cream rise up beneath it. Briefly stir in the 4 tablespoons of condensed milk and the two teaspoons of vanilla.

4: The first time I made this I added the chocolate all at once, and the second time I made it I did half quantities at a time and I really don’t think it made much difference — assuming you’re going the more straightforward former route, spatula the cream into a 1L capacity freezer-safe tin or container. Haphazardly spoon over the slightly cooled chocolate fudge filling here and there — making sure that you don’t forget any corners — letting it plunge deep passages of chocolate sauce beneath the cream’s surface. Once that’s done, use a skewer to gently ripple the cream and the chocolate together. Don’t overmix — the joy of this ice cream is finding those unmixed pockets of sauce in each spoonful.

5: Refrigerate the ice cream mixture for two hours — this part is optional but I always do it, imagining that it helps develop the flavour and texture, but without doing some side-by-side testing I can’t really claim any accuracy here, only habit. Then freeze it till solid, which should take around 4-6 hours. Let it sit for about ten minutes on your bench before serving.

Makes around 900ml.

Note:
This wouldn’t be too hard to make vegan — use coconut cream or another similar whipping cream, sweetened condensed coconut milk, and vegan butter.

music lately:

Everything’s Alright from the febrile 1994 cast recording of the New Zealand production of Jesus Christ Superstar, led by the sadly late Margaret Urlich with Jay Laga’aia and Darryl Lovegrove. The production on this and Ms Urlich’s silver-silk voice send me into a kind of trance every time — there’s this synthy strings noise at 3.10 that I absolutely cannot listen to while operating heavy machinery — and I know in my heart that a video recording of this production must exist, if only for posterity, and if I told you how much I’d pay to see it you would probably slap me.

Might as Well Get Used to It by Dead Flowers, which I’ve previously described as “a cross between that Radiohead song from the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack and that Gorillaz song Tomorrow Comes Today” and I can’t hit the bullseye harder than that but I will just add that it sounds like it should’ve been inescapably, life-changingly famous and it just somehow never was which only adds to its wistful, sunburnt-noir melancholy.

Fear by Low; so threateningly lethargic it makes me want to go for a sad yet nervous sprint.

Ponytail by Beat Happening, at first it’s like wait is this just a fraction too much production value for what I want from a Beat Happening song? But then it gets all weird and shoegazey like you’ve accidentally got the same song playing in three different open tabs and even though you don’t know where you stand, you know where you stand.

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PS: If you’re after a way to support a local charity who are doing their level best to get in on the ground and provide aid to people in Gaza, despite nonstop setbacks and ongoing atrocities, ReliefAid are doing amazing work.