The day David Lynch died, I started writing down my dreams again. Lately I’ve been dreaming of shiny ornaments and dead relatives and antique treasures and bodies of water, which are all the same thing, really. I’ve sporadically recorded my dreams since around 1996 and feel pulled to value them in this way once more. Though recipes sometimes appear to me as I sleep, with varying degrees of feasibility — I remain suspicious about the steak with Baileys that I dreamed about in 2003 — this ice cream inspiration came to me in the threshold of reality, that is, I heard the words “cookie dough ice cream” and wanted to better, or at least meet head-on, the foodstuff from whence those words were uttered. Making something so stridently yet winsomely Americana feels of a piece with processing the world without David Lynch, but to be clear, this is certainly not a celebration of America — can you imagine? — or even specifically of David Lynch, especially when I’ve previously written about the more pertinent cherry pie and my recipe for Twin Peaks Ice Cream. Writing this at 1am certainly adds to the dreamlike quality of today, tonight, or tomorrow, whatever you might call this time — vivid but not quite lucid for writer or reader, I suspect. Fear not, however, narratively speaking — though hungryandfrozen.com is frequently a liminal space, this is simply a sensational recipe for ice cream.

Like many ingredient combination developments, cookie dough ice cream outlives its longstanding prosaicness by being exceptionally delicious (see also, salted caramel) and so while my recipe is hardly fresh news, who wouldn’t be happy to be reminded of this notion? It has been my innate instinct since I first grasped object permanence and bipedalism to eat the cookie dough and the cake batter — to the point where I must factor it into the yield of any cookie recipes I share here. And so, to make cookie dough on purpose — never to be baked, perpetually suspended in amber, taking the stolen spoonful and giving it to you wholeheartedly — now there’s a concept I can replicate eternally without it ever tasting like a cliche.

But what does it taste like? — daylight is approaching and we still haven’t got to the fireworks factory yet. As with the most compelling ice creams, texture is as central here as the flavour. The rubble of sweet, vanilla-scented cookie dough scattered throughout the cream offers fudgy, dense, chocolate-studded and almost giddily heedless yet not cloying mouthfuls to sink your teeth through. The surrounding ice cream is mellow and tenderly unobtrusive with an entire can of condensed milk hiffed in, and fantastically simple to put together. It’s sweet, but not overbearing, and the addition of milk powder really makes the cookie dough taste emphatically like cookie to the power of cookie and not merely like chilled paste — offering a rounded, buttery, golden and slightly mysterious depth of flavour. I grant you, it’s a bit of a hassle to track down the milk powder but I’m convinced it’s crucial to this recipe’s success. That being said if you can’t get hold of it, between the cream, the sugar, and the chocolate, you’ll still likely have a very good time.

Recognising, as I have so often lately, that I’d hit a no-man’s-land between too late at night to keep going but too late at night to not keep going, I briefly attempted to go to bed instead of finishing this but heard David Lynch’s ebullient bellow in my head – you’ve gotta get your butt in gear and do it…figure out a way to get it done. As I’ve noted elsewhere, only Nigella Lawson has had more influence on my writing, so who am I to disagree with this exhortation, influencing my writing to exist at all?

For further ice creams of varying degrees of prosaicness I recommend my Corn, Raspberry and Mascarpone Ice Cream, my Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream, my Mint Choc Chip Ice Cream, plus this Raspberry Rainbow Slab which really did appear to me in a dream.

Choc chip cookie dough ice cream

A little obvious, but utterly delicious — obviously — and I’ve kept the ice cream method very straightforward to compensate for the brief effort required to make the cookie dough. Don’t leave out the milk powder, if you can possibly help it — it brings a specific, full-bodied suggestion of cookie with it. Also, I use salted butter — if yours isn’t, add some to taste. Concept obviously precedes me, but recipe by myself.

No-churn, of course!

• 75g butter
• 75g caster sugar
• 1 tablespoon golden syrup
• 3 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 125g flour
• 3 tablespoons full-fat milk powder
• 1/4 cup water
• 500ml cream
• 1 x 390g (or thereabouts) tin of condensed milk
• 100g very good quality chocolate drops or chocolate chips

1: Start by making the cookie dough, so it can cool down a little while you make the ice cream. Melt the 75g butter in a frying pan over a gentle heat, then remove from the heat and stir in the 75g sugar, the tablespoon of golden syrup and two teaspoons of the vanilla, leaving the third for later.

2: Stir in the 125g flour, the three tablespoons of milk powder, and the 1/4 cup of water to form a rather thick cookie dough. Set aside.

3: Pour the 500ml cream into a large mixing bowl and whisk vigorously until thickened enough for the whisk prongs to leave just visible trails in the cream — oh, you can use electric beaters, but you only want it aerated and firmed up, not completely whipped, and it doesn’t take that long. Switch to a spatula to fold in the tin of condensed milk — at this stage even a nudge from the whisk could over-whip it — and the remaining teaspoon of vanilla.

4: Now, assemble — fold about a third of the chocolate drops, a rough handful, into the bowl of cream, then spatula this mixture into a loaf tin or other freezer-safe container of about 1200ml capacity. Stir another third of the chocolate drops into the cookie dough and drop spoonfuls of this dough into the loaf tin haphazardly yet with even coverage; it will look like there’s not nearly enough dough in the pan but trust me on the ratio. Finally, scatter the remaining chocolate drops over the top and freeze the ice cream for around six hours — without stirring or even touching — or overnight, until solid. Now, generally I leave my not-yet-frozen ice cream mixture in the fridge for a couple of hours first to allow the flavours to develop; this time I simply did not have room in my fridge and it does make me wonder if the step is necessary or mere force of habit; you do what you have time, space, and any other capacity for.

Makes about 1.2 litres.

Let it sit on the bench for five minutes before attacking it with a spoon.

Note: I have been blithely eating cake batter and cookie dough and other uncooked items involving raw flour my entire life; I’m neither a doctor nor a scientist but, given that our flours all come from different sources, you’ll know if you need to bake the flour briefly first before using to prevent salmonella, and I have no intention of talking you out of it.

music lately:

Bikini Twilight by The Go Team. If you want to hear what Nirvana x Beat Happening sounds like, this gnashing instrumental is quite literally that; just when you think it’s being overtaken by the latter, here comes the former.

Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise, in a video directed by David Lynch. The first time I heard this song in Twin Peaks I could actively feel it rearranging my molecules and it still does, with that delicately persistent, rubber-ball-wrapped-in-lace bounce of the chorus and the dizzying swing of the guitars.

Two-Headed Mother by Ethel Cain, that watery guitar, the way it spirals at the end — she is amazing.

Freak Like Me by the Sugababes, which covers Adina Howard and samples Gary Numan and though it is somehow 22 years old now, every time I hear I imagine I understand how that prehistoric salamander felt, blood rushing coolly to its internal ears, upon stepping a brave foot out of the water and gulping its first breath of oxygen.

PS: The ceasefire in Gaza is conceptually vulnerable at best but there are reports of more widespread aid being allowed in at last, after more than a year. So, there’s truly no better time to donate to reputable orgs like ReliefAid’s Gaza Appeal as they continue tirelessly working to supply families with water.