Category: Pudding and Dessert

chocolate, rum, and prune truffle ice cream [vegan, no-churn]

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2023! Personally, I think we’ve gone too far and should try a do-over of one of the previous years but since — as we’ve well and truly established — I have no influence over the passage of time, here we are and here I am, hastily squeaking a blog post in while we’re barely still in that phase of January where you can reasonably keep saying “happy new year”; accompanied by a handful of blurry photos of ice cream from my phone. December was a tumultuous month for reasons out of my control, like being handed a punctured bucket of sand and being told every grain of sand you lose is going to cost you twenty dollars and you also are expected to tap dance while picking up the falling grains; and unsurprisingly none of that has magically gone away just because December finally ended, hence my unsteady launch into a new year of food blogging, but — as always! — while very little else can be counted on, this recipe for Chocolate, Rum, and Prune Truffle Ice Cream is, at least, so delicious.

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While most of my ice cream recipes lean towards the dense rather than the fluffy, texture-wise, this one has a particular cellular compression, like a very solid ganache, hence adding “truffle” to the title to warn you of its approaching sturdiness, while also providing a distracting flourish from the presence of the prunes, which, to be fair, aren’t everyone’s favourite sweetmeat. Me, I love a prune, with their plummy, almost tannin-y sweetness and depth, and here they bring a potent, rum-drenched fruitiness to the ice cream, well-matched by the bitter dark chocolate and expansive sweet creaminess of the coconut.

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The result tastes rather like Christmas cake mixed with brownie batter, immensely rich and grown-up, with a husky rummy finish that avoids overwhelming. It doesn’t look as elegant as it tastes, so if aesthetics are your watchword, you could consider having diminutive serving glasses as I’ve done in these photos, or freezing it in a lined loaf tin to cut into slices, or serving it with icing sugar-dusted raspberries for a pop of colour, or giving up entirely. On serving-based aesthetics, that is, not 2023 as a whole, because despite my recent lived experience I still have high hopes for the new year to nudge new good things into existence. I mean, we have this ice cream! That is a start.

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Chocolate, Rum, and Prune Truffle Ice Cream

Dense, intense, rich, with plummy rum-soaked pureed fruit and dark chocolate. As always, no ice cream maker is necessary but you do need to allow several hours for the prunes to soak (and, of course, for the ice cream itself to freeze). Recipe by myself.

  • 1 and 1/2 cups prunes
  • 3 tablespoons dark rum (see notes)
  • 200ml rooibos tea (that is, one cup minus about three tablespoons)
  • 250g dark chocolate
  • 1 x 320g tin condensed coconut milk (or condensed oat milk)
  • 1 x 400ml tin full-fat coconut cream
  • a pinch of salt

1: Soak the prunes in the rum and tea for about six hours, or overnight, in a sealed container (or — I just poured the rum and cooled tea directly onto the prunes in their snaplock bag from the bulk section of the supermarket where I bought them.)

2: Once step one is complete, either several hours later or the next day, puree the prunes and any remaining liquid in a blender or food processor. It’s up to you whether you want this to be a velvety puree or to retain some texture, I went for the latter but either is fine.

3: From here it’s pretty simple; gently melt the 250g dark chocolate in bursts in the microwave or in a heatproof bowl resting (without touching the water) on a small pan of simmering water. Once the chocolate is melted, stir in your condensed milk and coconut cream, and then spatula the prune puree from your blender into the chocolate mixture and stir again to combine. Finally, stir in a decent pinch of salt, to taste.

4: Transfer this delicious mixture into a container with a lid; I like to let my ice creams rest in the fridge for two hours first as I, perhaps misguidedly, feel that it improves the flavour and texture, so either after that or straight away if you’re impatient, freeze the chocolate mixture for about six hours or until, well, frozen.

Makes roughly 1.25 litres. Because of the alcohol content you only need to let this sit for a few minutes to make it spoonable.

Notes:

  • If you don’t wish to use rum, Marsala would be my second choice (in fact, it might be my first choice if I had both in front of me), otherwise bourbon or Pedro Ximinez sherry would be great. If you don’t wish to use alcohol at all simply leave it out, bearing in mind that the ice cream will be a lot more rock-hard without the softening effect of alcohol. I’d also add a couple teaspoons of vanilla extract for another layer of flavour.
  • You also don’t have to use rooibos if you don’t like the taste. It’s my preferred tea to soak dried fruit in, however Earl Grey would not be out of the question.

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music lately:

Pets by Porno for Pyros, I was going to call this song “nonplussedly cheerful” but one of the youtube commenters bested me with a more accurate description of “nihilistically hopeful”, and something in Perry Farrell’s scraped-hollow voice adds to the nihilism and the hopefulness of it.

Long Ago by Mariah Carey. Despite her staggering body of number 1 singles, she is never lethargic or parsimonious on the album tracks, and this slinky, low-lit song could’ve absolutely been a later release from the incredible Daydream.

Serenade in Blue by Ethel Ennis, her plush voice is glorious for interpreting this standard, but I am also fond of the long-shadowed cinematic orchestrations on the Glenn Miller original.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours every month. There’s no better time than right now — your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

The Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up!

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The thing about Christmas coming but once (thank goodness) a year is that with each iteration you realise, poignantly, how much has changed since the last one. While you could of course reflect upon this during any Tuesday or September, with its keen sense of tradition and consistency and focus on familial relationships and togetherness, Christmas certainly lends itself to introspection more than, say, Halloween — though don’t let me hold you back. It’s that very sameness that makes the changes sharply delineated, makes you wonder what will have transpired by next Christmas, but it can also be comforting; the same music, the same scent of pine, the same food. And despite the quinquereme of changes that 2022 has powerfully rowed into my life, we can all count on one thing remaining the same: my Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up!

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If this is news to you, each December I gather a list of recipes from my prior blog posts that I believe would make ideal edible gifts, in case you want prompting in that direction, despite having the entire internet already at your disposal. It’s a self-serving action, yes, but hopefully helpful — and all I ever really want is to be useful while drawing attention to myself in the process. In the spirit of consistency and tradition, and also in the spirit of retaining my own sanity in these trying times, I’ve kept a lot of the text in this post the same as in previous years — there’s only so many ways you can launch into this thing, and I appreciate your understanding.

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Christmas is a pretty fraught time of year as it is, and inescapable even if you’re not particularly invested — a bit like that primary school exercise where we inexplicably had to look after an egg for a week without breaking it, Christmas is a responsibility handed to you by a greater authority, fragile, and kind of wasteful in the grander scheme of things. But it’s happening, and if, like me, you’re someone who finds comfort and calm in cooking, then focussing your energy on making delicious edible gifts for people can reign in some of that generalised seasonal tension. Make a list, check it twice, work out which tier each person is on — are they worth putting in the effort to boil sugar? — pour yourself a small glass of port or a fruity cup of tea, and fill the kitchen with the scent of cinnamon and melting chocolate while the lights twinkle in your peripheral vision.

If you keep a relatively small circle, there are still neighbours, the postal service, and any number of people nearby who might be cheered by a jar or box of something in their letterbox with a friendly note attached. But even just you, alone, are reason enough to bake a cake.

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As for the financial pressures of this time of year — I won’t lie, between the ludicrous supermarket prices, time, electricity, storage and wrapping, homemade edible gifts aren’t necessarily cheap, and there’s no moral superiority in making your own jam. It is undeniably delightful to receive something homemade — but if this is too strenuous, stick with the food concept and do your Christmas shopping at the supermarket. The aforementioned ludicrous supermarket prices (all I want for Christmas is for more than one green vegetable at a time to be affordable) are still there to be reckoned with, but it’s undeniably fast and easy. Chocolates, candy, olive oil, fancy salt, spices, peanut butter, curry pastes, hot sauce, olives, a complicated shape of pasta? All delightful gifts. It can be as simple as just buying food you know someone happily eats a lot of. They love beans? Get them beans! They love noodles? Buy them a week’s worth! I guarantee they’ll be pleased. Basically, we cannot escape capitalism, but giving an edible gift has so many upsides: it’s delicious, it has immediate practical application, it will eventually cease taking up space in the receiver’s house, and it makes you look like a really great person, but perhaps more importantly, it shows the people you love that they’re worth a little time and consideration.

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I realise to heaps of people Christmas is — quite reasonably — just another day of the week! But there will be some point in your life when giving a gift is required, and almost all the recipes listed below work beautifully year-round (though I personally can’t eat candy canes out of season.)

Anyway, let’s get to it. I admit, I look forward to compiling this, especially when, throughout the year, I blog a recipe that could potentially augment the list. I’ve grouped the list into three categories, and have also included a few recipes I wrote for Tenderly over the years.

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Two caveats: some of these recipes are from absolute years ago, as will happen when you have a fifteen-year-old food blog, but while details and contexts and locations and motivations have changed, the deliciousness remains constant. Also, I feel like it’s worth noting anything that could melt should be stored in the fridge rather than under the tree for as long as possible.

Finally — all these recipes are vegan.

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The Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up!

Category One: Things In Jars

Things In Jars! That eternal receptacle, a glass jar makes the humblest of ingredients and least of efforts look welcoming and exertional. From relish to pickles to the unsinkable salted caramel sauce, Things in Jars are ideal gifts for your most marginally tolerable of coworkers or the most highly specific loves of your life. For added personal flair — though this could just be my neurological predisposition for over-explaining — I suggest including a gift tag with recommendations on ways to use the contents of the jar. I used to be extremely cavalier about the sterility of said jars, but after living at home I’ve been sufficiently old-wives-taled into respectful fear for botulism. I like to think that a jar fresh from the dishwasher is as close to sterile as you can hope for; otherwise, I’d consult the internet (and with the state of google these days it’s worth either going straight to youtube or adding “reddit” after your search term) for wise counsel on the process.

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Savoury:

Coconut Oat Chilli Crisp
Vegan Gochujang Bokkeum (if you know someone who likes chilli I cannot recommend this highly enough)
Roasted Plum Harissa
Cranberry Sauce (this recipe is super easy, and I make it almost every year to have with Christmas dinner)
Corn and Chilli Relish
Marinated Tamarillos
Taco Pickles
Sake Pickled Radishes
Preserved Limes
Dukkah (perhaps accompanied by a nice bottle of olive oil)
Spiced Peaches (very, very easy and good)
Olive Tapenade
Caramelised Onion Butter
Tomato Relish
Ras el hanout
Berbere
Khmeli Suneli (overachievers might consider making a tasting flight of these three spice mixes)
Cumin and Paprika Spiced Pumpkin Seed Butter
Peach Balsamic Barbecue Sauce
Roasted Chickpea Butter
Quick-Pickled Apples and Pears
Quick Pickled Scallions/Spring Onions
Pickled Eggplant

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Sweet

Pecan Cookie Granola Butter
Rhubarb, Raspberry and Cardamom Jam
Rhubarb Fig Jam
Berry Chia Seed Jam
Black Salted Caramel Sauce
Salted Pineapple Caramel Sauce
Orange Confit
Apple Cinnamon Granola
Strawberry Jam Granola
Buckwheat, Cranberry and Cinnamon Granola
Caramel Walnut Granola
Lux Maple Granola
The Best Granola (the others are still good, but it’s named for a reason)
Lemon Curd
Salted Vanilla Brazil Nut Butter
Coffee Cinnamon Hazelnut Butter
Rhubarb Fruit Mince (very easy and delicious and surprisingly easy to find ways to use)

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Category Two: Baked Goods

They’re baked! They’re good! While biscuits and cookies are more commonly gifted, don’t rule out a loaf, perhaps wrapped in baking paper and then brown paper — the ginger molasses loaf below keeps forever and would make a charmingly convivial offering. And at this busy time of year, having something to slice and eat with a cup of tea or a snifter of whatever weird liqueur you can find in the back of the cupboard is nothing if not a stroke of good fortune. I’ve made the Christmas Star Cookies a LOT and recommend them enthusiastically, but for some reason they work better if you make individual batches repeatedly rather than trying to double or triple the ingredients. As for how to present them, you don’t need to convert your house into an arts-and-crafts station; a handful of cookies in a cellophane or sandwich bag tied with a bow is fine, or pile them into takeout containers which is easy, practical, and less of a single-use-plastic vibe. I’m still partial to the magic of curling ribbon, but a wider ribbon will create a distracting flourish for simple packaging. Don’t stress about it too much though, the food itself is the star here.

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Christmas Star Cookies
Pistachio Toffee Cookies (gorgeous, but the toffee softens after a couple of days, so make them closer to the date of giving)
Chocolate Rosemary Cookies (very elegant, and you could tie a sprig of rosemary in with the packaging for rustic Christmassy effect)
Hundreds and Thousands Biscuits
Rum + Pecan Cookies
Chewy Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies
Pecan Sandies
Brown Butter Chocolate Brownies
Viv’s Crackers (good to make anyway for general nibbling)
Vanilla Chocolate Macarons (high effort, high reward, but like, really high effort, this isn’t for people you feel indifference towards)
Dark Rum Tahini Chocolate Walnut Cookies
Roasted Carrot Cake with Apple Cider Vinegar Buttercream (if this or the poppyseed loaf below has to travel a long distance I’d leave them uniced)
Lemon Poppyseed Loaf Cake
Ginger-Molasses Loaf Cake (I have made dozens and dozens of these, and it’s excellent with treacle instead of molasses)
The Very Best Vegan Christmas Cake (I do not exaggerate)

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Category Three: Novelty, No-Bake Sweets, and General Sugary Chaos

The best category, let’s be frank. Whether it’s dissolving candy canes in bottom-shelf vodka or adding pink food colouring to white chocolate for the aesthetic, sugar is the true reason for the season. And since dentists wildly overcharge us for their service, you might as well make them really earn it. Note: even with overproof vodka the passionfruit and mandarin liqueurs probably won’t be ready in time for Christmas; unless you can find out-of-season feijoas there’s no point trying that recipe either, but either give the intended receiver an IOU, or save it for their birthday — or next Christmas.

Homemade Feijoa Vodka
Homemade Passionfruit Liqueur
Homemade Mandarin Liqueur
Candy Cane Vodka (or Peppermint Schnapps if you will — it’s almost literally potable!)
Coffee-Orange Liqueur aka Forty Four
Old Fashioned Lemonade Cordial
Chocolate Pistachio Fudge (incredibly easy, and it’s a Nigella recipe so you can really trust it)
Chocolate-Nut Fudge Candies
Three-ingredient Chocolate Caramel Hearts
Candy Cane Bark
Homemade Bounty Bars
Salted Chocolate Cashew Butter Slice
Almond Butter Toffee
Old Fashioned Fudge
Chocolate Caramel Rice Bubble Slice
No-bake Cookie Dough Truffles
Vegan White Chocolate
Vegan Cookies and Cream White Chocolate
Raspberry Rainbow Slab

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(Pictured, in order from the top: Chocolate Pistachio Fudge; Candy Cane Bark; Rhubarb Fruit Mince; Sake-Pickled Radishes; Chocolate-Nut Fudge Candies; Candy Canes (just as they are, not a recipe); Rhubarb, Raspberry, and Cardamom Jam; Roasted Plum Harissa; Berry Chia Seed Jam; Christmas Star Cookies; The Best Christmas Cake; Homemade Mandarin Liqueur; Raspberry Rainbow Slab.)  

music lately:

Turkey Lurkey Time from the 1969 Tony Awards performance of the musical Promises, Promises. I have a small personal tradition where I watch this clip every December 1st and invariably start crying, which is where I should point out that it is absolutely not a number intended to stir that kind of emotion. I can’t explain it, it’s something about Donna McKechnie’s elasticated spine, it’s the diagonal convergence at the end, it’s the way I wait for it each year, it’s the culmination of all the previous years up until this point, it’s Christmas!

Amen, by Jolie Holland, a song of almost otherworldly soothing beauty from her glorious album Escondida.

Supervixens, by A.R Kane, I mean, this is a time for tradition after all, and this will always remain one of my top-listened songs of any year, and every time I listen it’s more messy, more yearning, more weird, more amazing.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours every month. There’s no better time than right now — your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Chocolate-Nut Fudge Candies

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You can usually pinpoint the exact moment that I become cognisant of Christmas approaching because I’ll suddenly post an utterly frivolous recipe whose existence clearly serves to augment my annual edible Christmas gift round-up. Case in frivolous point, these Chocolate-Nut Fudge Candies, which you’ll see added to this year’s imminent list in a couple of weeks. I mean, I’m also aware that the Fideles are Adeste-ing because I’ve started having those dreams where I wake up on Christmas Day and haven’t organised any presents and everyone is deeply disappointed in me. But only one of these internal alarm clocks results in chocolate, and even though I am still largely in Thesis Replicant Mode (a mode which, admittedly, feeds on itself more than my thesis probably requires at this point) I still heeded the call.

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If you need to cook something giddy and impetuous there are few safer bets than a second-hand mid-century book of recipes compiled from women across America titled America’s Favourite Recipes, subheading: Desserts, sub-subheading: including party beverages. I love to read this book when in need of comfort, and they weren’t lying about the party beverages, such as Cranberry Eggnog, a “mock Tom Collins” with two cups of milk in it, and a punch that includes, but is not restricted to, maraschino cherries, pineapple juice, and peppermint extract. These chocolate candies — and I use the American word here since it makes sense, provenancially — are adapted from a recipe in the book by Mrs O.S. Dews, who was, at the time of publishing in 1968, the president of the Officers’ Wives’ Club in Ogden, Utah. Should Mrs Dews still be kicking about, I graciously thank her.

@hungryandfrozen

chocolate-nut fudge candies 🤠 full recipe at hungryandfrozen dot com #chocolate #vegan #ediblechristmasgifts

♬ I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm – Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra

Though there’s a bit of boiling sugar involved here this recipe is remarkably easy and very delicious — admittedly, not a super complex flavour profile, it instead evokes solidified chocolate icing, but this is hardly a bad thing. Also, despite having not a lick of dairy, the combination of toffee shocked into submission by a pile of chocolate really does end up tasting like fudge, with its wet-sand, tooth-exfoliating soft melting grittiness.

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The dusting of dehydrated plum powder, scattering on the white baking paper like pohutukawa needles (or, I suppose, a Fargo-esque spray of blood) on fallen snow, is, I assure you, truly for aesthetic purposes only. You could consider sprinkling over edible glitter to give it the old razzle dazzle, lean into immaturity with rainbow sprinkles, or assume a soberly logical stance and simply press extra cashews into the surface of the cooling chocolate candies. Either way, these are delicious post-dinner fortifiers or, logically, edible gifts, and just be glad my eyes weren’t caught by the peanut brittle recipe at the bottom of the same page of this book, which lists 16 inches (!!) of paraffin wax in the ingredients; but then it did win a prize at the Tulsa State Fair…

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Chocolate-Nut Fudge Candies

You need to pay a little bit of attention here but these aren’t too arduous and they make, needless to say, an excellent edible gift. With their simple chocolate flavour they’re very kid-friendly, but maybe keep them out of the way while you’re boiling the sugar. Recipe adapted from the Favourite Recipes of America: Desserts book.

  • 200g dark chocolate
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup golden syrup (or light corn syrup for the Americans)
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
  • 1/2 cup roasted, salted cashews
  • 1/4 cup boiling water
  • salt, for scattering over
  • dehydrated plum powder, to serve (very optional)

1: Roughly chop the 200g dark chocolate and set aside. Just leave it on the chopping board, no need to decant it into a separate bowl. You might as well rip off a couple sheets of baking paper and lay them on baking trays for later, too.

2: Place the two cups of sugar, cup of brown sugar, 1/4 cup golden syrup, 1/2 cup water and teaspoon of vinegar into a large heavy-based saucepan and cook over a low heat for about fifteen minutes, stirring constantly without letting it bubble up, until the sugar is entirely dissolved, or near enough. You’ll see it on the back of your spoon — it’ll look clear and shiny rather than gritty — and you should be able to feel it as you stir as well.

3: Once the sugar is dissolved, turn up the heat and let the sugar mixture boil, without stirring, for three minutes. The second three minutes are up, remove the pan from the heat, and once the bubbles have subsided, throw in the chopped chocolate and stir energetically.

4: Once the chocolate has entirely melted and incorporated and the mixture has thickened considerably, let it sit for ten minutes to cool a little. While this is happening, roughly chop the 1/2 cup of roasted salted cashews and boil the jug for the water. Stir the cashews into the saucepan along with the 1/4 cup boiling water — the chocolate mixture will go from quite dry and crumbly to shiny again — and drop tablespoons of the mixture onto baking trays lined with baking paper. Sprinkle over a little salt and, if you like, shake a little dehydrated plum powder (or any other red fruit, plum is just what I had in the cupboard) through a sieve over the chocolate candies.

Allow the candies to cool and firm up, then store them in an airtight container in the fridge. Makes around 30 – 35.

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music lately:

American Teen by Ethel Cain, a fitting song to go with this recipe. Whether its an indictment of my age or just the fact that I genuinely prefer very old music, I’ve hit a point where I struggle to care about or resonate with much of anything that hasn’t already existed for many years, but this song broke through my walls and defences. Possibly because it has a distinct 1994-ish energy, but probably because it’s wildly beautiful and exhilarating with the kind of lively guitar riffs that make you want to raise a can of Pepsi-cola up a flagpole and salute it.

The Nitty Gritty by Shirley Ellis, the way this song perambulates and syncopates is so immensely satisfying, as is Ellis’ gorgeous voice, though little is as satisfying as the ludicrously sincere dancing in the video with it, I highly recommend clicking through.

(Birds Fly) Whisper to a Scream by Icicle Works, just the song you want playing as you run through concrete back alleys in the rain wearing a scratchy wool jumper while charmingly and cinematically coming of age circa 1983. Those drums — those drums!!

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours every month. There’s no better time than right now — your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Cardamom Thyme Chocolate Puddings

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Every time I think I’ve Done Something by adding a pinch of cardamom to a recipe I hear Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly saying “florals, for spring? Groundbreaking”, but as I favour known deliciousness over needless striving for innovation (or worse: striving for virality) I can calmly tell this fictional character onto whom I’m projecting that yes, cardamom is wonderful, and here’s more of it. Obviously people have been using cardamom for centuries — it’s referred to in ancient Sanskrit texts, was beloved of Hippocrates, part of the Song Dynasty economy — and it’s pleasing to know, as I tuck into this chocolate pudding from the comfort of my bed, that I’m participating in the noble continuation of a grand culinary tradition.

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Sometimes the right answer isn’t where you’re looking for it. This recipe started off as an ice cream, and very fine it was, but the wistfully cardamom-tinted richness of the unfrozen mixture stuck with me more, so I made it again and dialled it back a few steps. Both cardamom and thyme have a kind of resiny, oily fragrance that’s wobbling just on the precipice of lemon without actually being lemony; together they lift the chocolate’s heavy curtains while still emphasising its richness, adding an air of mystery without being intrusive. Now, the first time I made this I let the coconut cream sit with its bashed cardamom pods for six hours to infuse, the second time I was in more of a hurry and it only sat for half an hour; it was still good but the cardamom didn’t make itself so known. If you end up in this same position, put ground cardamom on your shopping list and add as much as you need to the chocolate mixture till the flavour pops.

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This recipe is, I grant you, kind of annoying: first I ask for cashew butter (what are we, squillionaires) and second it requires two separate saucepans, but at least you don’t have to use a blender? And after a certain point of streamlining and cutting corners we have to accept that cooking food does involve being in your kitchen. For your efforts and sink full of dishes, however, you get a chocolate pudding of astonishing lusciousness, so dense and dark that you half expect a curious hippo’s nostrils to emerge through its surface; wildly sophisticated thanks to the individual portions and fragrant cardamom (and my fairly low bar for what constitutes sophistication), and yet inner-childishly comforting with its yielding softness and vague evocation, as you drag your spoon through the chocolate, of being given a scraped-out bowl of cake batter to lick. (Also: no tiktok video this week, my phone has suddenly decided it has all the capacity and power of a 125mb thumb drive from 2006 and as such I was up till 3am last night trying to clear storage space so I could edit one single video of chocolate melting and was thwarted at every turn. I have about 1000 fewer photos on my phone but it’s still being all “no x” whenever I try to edit that one video. Can’t wait till I try this again next time!)

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Cardamom Thyme Chocolate Puddings

Velvet-rich chocolate kissed with cardamom and fresh thyme: it’s a little messy to make and requires some advance planning, but every spoonful is a reward. And if you don’t have time to let the coconut cream infuse, add 1/2 a teaspoon ground cardamom — or more to taste — as you’re mixing it into the chocolate. Recipe by myself.

  • 4 cardamom pods
  • 2 sprigs fresh thyme
  • 1 x 400ml tin full-fat coconut cream
  • 1 cup/250ml water
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
  • 2 tablespoons golden syrup
  • 3 heaped tablespoons smooth cashew butter
  • 200g dark chocolate
  • Extra thyme leaves, for serving

1: Split the cardamom pods with a knife to release the black seeds within, and place the seeds and pods along with the two sprigs of thyme and the tin of coconut cream in a small saucepan and gently heat it, stirring, till the coconut cream is just too hot to touch, with a couple small bubbles escaping to the surface, but nowhere near boiling. Remove it from the heat — if you have the time, let it sit for about six hours in the fridge to soak up all the cardamom and thyme flavour, if not, just set it aside while you get on with the rest of the recipe, and add some ground cardamom to taste when you mix it into the chocolate later.

2: Roughly chop the 200g dark chocolate and set aside. In another saucepan, stir together the cup of water, the 1/2 cup brown sugar, two tablespoons golden syrup and three heaped tablespoons smooth cashew butter. Bring to a boil, stirring regularly with a whisk — it’ll look very unlikely at this stage but with a little heat (and a lot of chocolate later) it will all come together. Once it’s reached the boil, by which point it should resemble caramel sauce, let it bubble away for two minutes, stirring constantly, and then remove from the heat.

3: Let the cashew syrup sit for a minute till it stops bubbling, then tip in the chopped dark chocolate and briskly stir till the chocolate has melted. Now, take your initial pan of coconut cream, and strain it into the chocolate mixture through a sieve, so it catches the leaves and bits of cardamom. Whisk the two mixtures together, adding ground cardamom at this point if you feel like it needs a boost, and divide this mixture between your chosen serving bowls. Refrigerate the puddings for about two hours (though they can happily sit in the fridge overnight if need be) and serve scattered with extra thyme leaves.

The number of servings depends on the size of your ramekins/bowls etc, but this makes roughly 700ml of pudding mixture, and I divided it between six different receptacles, which made for a comfortable serving of pudding: enough to feel like you’ve really eaten something, but not enough that you feel like you’ve overcommitted. It would look lovely in martini or other cocktail glasses, I also liked how they looked in the base of the capacious stemless wine glasses that you can see in some of the photos here. And you could always test how it will look by filling your glasses with the same amount of water first, eg if you have seven glasses then pour in 100ml water.

Notes:

  • I haven’t tested it either way so I couldn’t say for sure but if you can’t get cashew butter, I imagine you could replace it with smooth almond butter; you could possibly leave it out altogether, bearing in mind the effect this will have on the finished texture and richness. I periodically order cashew butter from Revive, it’s the best I’ve ever tasted, it keeps for ages, and they regularly put it on special.
  • If your cashew butter is unsalted, add a pinch of salt when you’re whisking the chocolate and coconut cream together; you could also sprinkle over some sea salt flakes to serve.
  • If you’re serving this to fusspots who don’t like cardamom and thyme, subtle though they are here, leave them out and add a couple teaspoons of vanilla extract when whisking everything together at the end.

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music lately:

Kid by Steve Lawrence (aka Mr Eydie Gormé) from the 1968 musical Golden Rainbow. Apropos of nothing I’ve decided to work my way through every Broadway flop mentioned in the song Monkeys and Playbills from [title of show]; Golden Rainbow is second on the list and there’s something charming about this song, about that cavernous late-60s sound, and about Lawrence’s throaty, Scott Walker-esque voice.

It’s Like That, by Run-DMC and Jason Nevins. Simply cannot overstate the effect that this music video had on me in 1997! I require an oral history of it right now!

Seagull by Ride, the sort of song that makes you feel like you could run vertically up a gust of wind onto the roof of a tall building, perhaps following it up by leaping from rooftop to rooftop as you run from one end of the city to the other without any danger of falling.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Biscoff Ice Cream

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Nigella Lawson spoke, in Feast, of her Wildean propensity for “reproducing artifice by natural means”. This recipe is kind of the opposite, or at least a downwards diagonal line from that concept, essentially recreating the natural (ice cream) by artificial means (three different containers of stuff mixed together.) It feels almost gallingly artless to give you a grocery list and call it a recipe, but I don’t see the point in complicating the process just to make it feel worthwhile — which really would be artifice.

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Speaking of galling, there’s no getting around how expensive Biscoff is — I’m literally pricing myself out of my own recipe here — so either wait for it to come on special, or see if you can find it at one of those shops where they sell products close to their use-by date, and, most practically of all, only make this for someone you really like.

However, I wouldn’t commit to such expense without sound reason: this ice cream tastes EXCELLENT. Hardly surprising given the ingredients, but still, reassuring (and I did have an irrational jolt of fear right before I taste-tested that it might’ve turned into a culinary disaster.) I’d never even tried Biscoff till last week; the first spoonful made me laugh hysterically, that’s how shockingly good it was. If you’re not familiar, Biscoff is a spreadable paste made of crushed biscuits, sugar, and fat, hailing from Belgium — it tastes incredibly caramelised and toasty, and not overly sweet, with that verboten stolen deliciousness of cookie dough and the rubble-y crunch of actual cookies. It’s bewilderingly, feverishly moreish, and a monument to favouring the joyful over the necessary and prudent. It’s also, somehow, vegan, and whether this was on purpose or accidental, I’m grateful to the people of Belgium for making it so.

@hungryandfrozen

vegan biscoff ice cream • no churn, three infredients, recipe at hungryandfrozen dot com #biscoff #icecream #vegan #nochurnicecream

♬ Pink Moon – Nick Drake

I’m not claiming to have come up with the idea for Biscoff-flavoured ice cream — without even looking I can tell you there’s probably hundreds of versions online already — but this is my recipe, and doesn’t sway from my favoured method of coconut cream plus condensed coconut milk. I chose a ripple effect to maximise the Biscoff-iness of it all; giving you caramel-biscuity ribbons throughout the rich ice cream, itself sand-coloured and gritty from a few spoonfuls of the Biscoff whisked through. The process is simple, involving no more than a bit of stirring, and the results are both greater than the sum of their parts and also exactly as great as the sum of their parts. Or something. And, back to my earlier point about only making this for someone you really like — if that means making it just for yourself, then you should absolutely, definitely do it. There’s no one more deserving.

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Biscoff Ice Cream

Biscoff, ice cream, it’s not rocket science, it is delicious. As always with my ice cream recipes this is no-churn and doesn’t require an ice cream maker. Recipe by myself.

  • 1 x 380g jar Lotus Biscoff crunchy spread
  • 2 x 400ml tins full fat coconut cream
  • 1 x 320g tin sweetened condensed coconut milk

1: Whisk three tablespoons of the Biscoff together with the coconut cream and condensed coconut milk in a large bowl; it will take a bit of stirring to get all three textures to meld with each other, but there’s no need to break out an electric mixer unless you really feel like it.

2: Spatula the remaining Biscoff from its jar into a smaller bowl. Slowly whisk in about a half cup of the coconut cream mixture from the larger bowl till the Biscoff is more spoonable and liquid, adding a little more if necessary. I realise it’s counter-intuitive to add it to the first mixture and then stir it back into the rest of the Biscoff, if you can work out a better way around this, be my guest!

3: Pour the coconut cream mixture into a freezer-safe container with a lid. Spoon over the Biscoff mixture from the smaller bowl, and use the handle of your spoon or some other implement to ripple the coconut cream and Biscoff together a little. Place the lid on the container and refrigerate for two hours (optional: I feel like it improves the taste and texture, but I have no science to back up this claim) then freeze for six hours or overnight. No stirring or churning required, just let it get solid.

Makes around 1.2 litres. Before serving, let the container sit for about fifteen minutes on the bench first so the ice cream can soften.

Notes:

  • I’ve only made this with the crunchy version of Biscoff. I’m sure it would be fine with the smooth version — how could it not be! — but I do think the crunchy texture adds something
  • Full-fat coconut cream is necessary to get the best results from this recipe
  • The sweetened condensed coconut milk that I use is by Nature’s Charm, I’ve found it at all chain supermarkets in NZ

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music lately:

The Great City by Nancy Wilson. Her extensive back catalogue is such a joy to work your way through (particularly for those who enjoy that wire brush drumstick type of percussion.) I’d never heard this song before but it sounds like it should be a standard, playing in the background of 90% of films set in New York City. “If you come in be sure you can get back out.”

No Peace For the Wicked by The Only Ones, it makes a fine melancholically poetic pairing with Hospital by The Modern Lovers. It takes some skill to be melancholically poetic and charming instead of annoying!

Rockafeller Skank by Fatboy Slim. That girl in the music video who is driving her car and bobbing her head along to the beat and then she starts shaking her head really fast and looking super happy? That’s me, listening to this song. Except I can’t drive. Anyway this is song is simply one of the greatest manifestations of human ability and it deserves to be on the soundtrack of every movie ever made. Yes, including Casablanca.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Kiwifruit Ripple Ice Cream

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I’m a simple woman: all I need for my personal Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to be amply and abundantly fulfilled is to come up with a new ice cream recipe once a month. I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say, exasperatedly and broadly, removing my spectacles and pinching the bridge of my nose in great weariness, that this year really has just been one thing after another. But realising that we’re six months in to 2022 and I still haven’t invented an ice cream recipe? Well, that did shed some light on this on-the-back-foot feeling; sure, ice cream wouldn’t have changed any of the events that were completely out of my hands, but I would’ve had ice cream! In my hands!

We’re not entirely out of the woods here; this isn’t a brand-new recipe but a vegan reworking of an old recipe from my 2013 cult hit cookbook, but it’s new-ish, and it is, undeniably, ice cream, and that’s enough for now. Not to undermine my capacity for invention, but to me kiwifruit aren’t theeeee most versatile recipe, and the recipes that I do see using them have a kind of strained, strenuous quality (steak with kiwifruit, et cetera). Fortunately, their mouth-shrinking sour-sweetness is made to be paired with creamy, mellow vanilla ice cream, especially in this format, with the contrast between the ice cream and the ribbons of green snaked throughout.

@hungryandfrozen

vegan kiwi fruit ripple ice cream 🥝➿🍦no churn, no ice cream maker, totally delicious. Full recipe on my blog hungryandfrozen dot com #icecream #kiwi #vegan #nochurn #cooking

♬ Powerman – The Kinks

I’ve pretty well settled into my condensed milk/coconut cream base recipe for ice cream so there won’t be any surprises there for longtime readers; and as always, I am rallying against Big Ice Cream Maker by keeping this no churn (in fact, the less you touch it the better, to preserve those precious delineated ripples.) There is a bit more dishwashing than usual involved because you have to puree then heat the kiwifruit, but it’s still the work of minutes. The other thing I should warn you about — although you can probably see from the photos — is that the kiwifruit puree won’t be as vividly green as the cut fruit themselves promise, it will still look pretty, but not quite as cartoonishly green as you’d initially expect.

And the result, easily won, is glorious: a parenthesis of velvety ice cream around bursts of fizzingly brassy and sour kiwifruit, two opposites in each spoonful, like listening to an EDM remix of a piece of classical music (though I’m not sure if that description is actually selling it or not.) This might be my first new (ish) ice cream for 2022, but it will not be the last. Also, if this has piqued your interest for ice cream of the ripple genre, see also my recipes for  Vegan Jelly Tip Ice Cream, Vegan Salted Caramel Ice Cream, and Vegan Treacle Black Pepper Ripple Ice Cream (in all cases I’d use the same base that I’ve used here, some of these were made before the advent of condensed coconut milk.)

Vegan Kiwifruit Ripple Ice Cream

Lush vanilla ice cream rippled with swirls of pureed kiwifruit, sweet and sour and delicious all at once. And, of course, like all my ice cream recipes it’s no-churn with no ice cream machine required! Recipe by myself.

  • 8 kiwifruit
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • 1 teaspoon agar agar powder (optional)
  • 1 x 400ml tin full-fat coconut cream
  • 1 x 310g tin sweetened condensed coconut milk
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1: Scoop the green flesh from your kiwifruit and puree it — either using a blender, or you can put them directly into the saucepan required for the next step and blitz them with a stick blender. Either way, it’s fine to have a few bits and pieces of fruit still in the blended mixture.

2: Gently heat the pureed kiwifruit and the tablespoon of sugar until the sugar has dissolved and then, (optionally) mix the teaspoon of agar agar powder with 1/4 cup water and stir it into the kiwifruit mixture, then continue stirring over the lowest possible heat for another two minutes. If it starts to bubble, remove it from the heat — you’re just warming it through. Set it aside to cool a little. (If you don’t have agar agar just skip this step and simply stir the tablespoon of sugar into the uncooked, pureed kiwifruit, but the agar agar does help with the texture of the eventual kiwifruit ripple.)

3: Now that the hard part is over, just whisk together the tins of coconut cream and sweetened condensed coconut milk with the tablespoon of vanilla; then tip 3/4 of this into a 2 litre freezer-proof container. Spoon over the kiwifruit mixture in dribs and drabs, followed by the rest of the coconut cream mixture, and use the tip of a knife or something similar to gently ripple the two mixtures together. Go easy: too much agitation and it’ll all become one uniform mass, which will still be delicious, but the less you touch it the more ripple-y it will eventually be.

4: Clip the lid onto the container and refrigerate it for two hours, then freeze for six hours or overnight. This needs to sit on the bench for twenty minutes before you try to bust into it.

Makes around 1.25 litres.

Notes:

  • I used Nature’s Charm vegan condensed milk since…they seem to be the only brand that makes it. I’m glad they do, it’s rather revolutionised the way I make ice cream.
  • Agar Agar is usually easily found at asian supermarkets and health food shops, but you might be able to find it at a chain supermarket, either in the baking aisle or the dark corner where they shunt all the vegan and organic food.
  • I haven’t tested this recipe without the agar agar, but the original recipe in my cookbook just used pureed kiwifruit and sugar, nothing else, and that turned out fine.
    You probably don’t need to refrigerate the ice cream before freezing it, I’ve decided that it improves the flavour and texture but I’m not sure I could defend that claim in a court of law.

music lately:

My Good Fortune by PJ Harvey, ugh this song is so cool and we all will be too if we listen to it. That zig-zagging guitar lick! The drawn-out word endings! The big apple, baby!

We Care A Lot by Faith No More (specifically the Chuck Mosley — RIP — version from Introduce Yourself.) Look at the nearest clock. What time is it? Time to listen to this song. Speaking of time, I love — aside from everything else I love about this song — how the drums somehow feel half a beat too fast and yet half a beat too slow. Like, same.

Bless The Lord from the film version of Godspell, by Lynne Thigpen. Despite having seen this movie a million times and owning about seven different versions of the cast recording on vinyl I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what’s happening here — there’s something about putting Jesus in a musical that begets the most unintelligible vibes, but also the most incredible music. Listen to that “oh yeah” breakdown at about 1 minute in and tell me you don’t get chills! The filmed versions of stage musicals don’t always get it right, but Thigpen’s rendition of this is the best I’ve ever heard, and I’m not sure there’ll ever be a better one.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Nigella’s Chocolate Pistachio Fudge [vegan]

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Between the unrepentant 100% humidity and anticipating Christmas and finally emerging from lockdown (only to find that having people expect things from me again can be as overwhelming as the numbing nothingness of the last three months), I have been witless, utterly witless. I had great intentions to achieve things this week but kept blowing all my energy and acuity on relatively innocuous activities—the Succession finale, sending one single email—and with them, my battery life would plummet like a six-month-old smartphone. I suspect I’m not the only one in this hole-punctured boat, so this is not going to be a long blog post, nor is it an emotionally taxing recipe.

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And fortunately I have the reason for the season—Nigella Lawson—to be the one set of footprints in the sand carrying me through with her boundless enthusiasm, knowledge, and reassurance. This recipe for Chocolate Pistachio Fudge couldn’t be easier—melt and stir, that’s literally it—and the results are so luscious, so elegant, so immediately celebratory and generous, you can practically tell just by looking at it who must’ve come up with the recipe.

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Somehow the simple combination of dark chocolate and condensed milk produces a flavour of immense, complex richness, almost as if there is a liqueur involved, or at least a significantly longer list of ingredients. I haven’t done anything particularly clever here in making Nigella’s recipe vegan; the sweetened condensed oat milk is very easy to find nowadays (and condensed coconut milk, even more prevalent) and the refined coconut oil is an easy replacement for butter. The pistachios sprinkled across the top (modestly, since it’s near-on double figures for a very small package of them at the supermarket) provide mellow, buttery crunch and visual opulence, their bright green almost neon against the moody chocolate backdrop.

@hungryandfrozen

vegan chocolate pistachio fudge 🍫 inspired by Nigella 🍫 recipe at hungryandfrozen.com #vegan #chocolate #christmas #homemadegift #recipes #foodblog

♬ Sugar Rum Cherry – Duke Ellington

It goes without saying that this fudge makes an excellent gift. Just make sure you keep it in the freezer (or at the very least, the fridge) both before and after it’s received. And of course, if you’re in the mood to make edible gifts for people this year, there’s my recipe list/round up at your service, and I’d also like to draw your attention to my 24 Hour Party Seitan if you’re after a main course idea for the day itself. I hope everyone out there has a Christmas that’s as peaceful and mellow as is feasibly possible, whether it’s a great big deal or just another day of the week, and I’ll see you all in 2022—a year whose repetition of numbers makes it feel impossibly futuristic, but apparently it’s coming, and it’s real! (Also It’s Coming, It’s Real by Swans was my most-listened to song on Spotify this year. You know what they say, the medium is the message!)

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Nigella’s (vegan) Chocolate Pistachio Fudge

This is almost shockingly simple, for how delicious and elegant the results are. It’s not the traditional kind of fudge—more of a general rich confection—but who cares, it tastes amazing and looks gorgeous. I’ve simply swapped the condensed milk for condensed oat milk and it works perfectly, you could also use condensed coconut milk, both are usually next to each other on the shelf and both are made by the good people at Nature’s Charm. I’ve also reduced the pistachios to a mere sprinkling on the surface, because they’re so expensive at the moment. If this isn’t something that bothers you, by all means add more. Recipe adapted by me, from Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Express.

  • 375g dark chocolate (50% is good here), roughly chopped
  • 1 x 320g can of sweetened condensed oat milk or sweetened condensed coconut milk
  • 3 tablespoons refined coconut oil
  • a pinch of salt
  • 2 tablespoons pistachios, roughly chopped

1: Place the chocolate, condensed milk, (making sure to spatula out every last precious, sticky drop) coconut oil, and salt into a heavy saucepan. Stir constantly over a very low heat until the chocolate melts, turning everything into a glossy, thick brown liquid. This only took a couple minutes at most for me.

2: Line a 23cm square tin with baking paper (or, as Nigella suggests, use a throwaway foil tray) and spatula the chocolate mixture into it, spreading it gently towards each corner in an even layer. Sprinkle over the pistachios and refrigerate till firm. That’s all there is to it!

Makes 64 squares if you slice it eight times vertically and horizontally, which seems like a magically enormous quantity to achieve from such a small amount of ingredients, and definitely justifies the cook trying a few pieces.

Store the fudge in an airtight container in the freezer (I re-use the baking paper between the layers of slices) where its texture and flavour only improves. This does soften quite quickly, or at least in this vicious heat it will, so if you’re going to give this as a gift, still keep it cold.

Notes: 

  • If you need this fudge to be gluten-free, use the condensed coconut milk instead of the oat milk
  • Refined coconut oil, specifically, doesn’t taste at all like coconut and won’t impart any such flavour to your fudge. If you get regular/unrefined coconut oil it will probably give a distinct flavour to your fudge, but will behave the same otherwise 
  • Because our tins of condensed oat/coconut milk are smaller than the dairy condensed milk tins, I increased the quantity of chocolate a little to compensate 

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music lately:

Have Fun Go Mad by Blair—just when I think I’ve excavated every possible memory, something will appear that I haven’t considered since the turn of the century and I’ll suddenly be flung back in time. The title of this song and artist may not ring any bells but click through and if you’re of a certain age you, too, can experience this backwards-flinging towards the mid 90s. This song is so uncool that it comes full circle and is in fact the coolest thing I’ve ever heard, and I’m glad to have heard it again after so long.

O Holy Night by Mahalia Jackson. It simply isn’t Christmas without Mahalia, her voice rises up to heights we can only see by telescope without even breaking a sweat.

Cherry Cherry by Neil Diamond, look, he’s not a man to whom I’ve ever given the time of day (to the point where I had to search for this song by typing “what is that one Neil Diamond song that I like, you know, that one that slaps”) but this song! It unequivocally slaps! He really pulled a rabbit out of a hat here! I’m not ashamed to say it!

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Hokey Pokey Ice Cream

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Hokey Pokey is what you might call an iconic ice cream flavour here in Aotearoa, and its beauty lies in its simplicity and that texture – crunch against cold creaminess – and I’ve done my best to honour it and the collective sentimental memories of our tastebuds here in my homemade version. I won’t pretend that you can’t taste the coconut cream, but that’s the vegan life for you – and it’s hardly a bad thing! Coconut is delicious! If anything, its mellow beachiness only serves to enhance the hauntingly sweet depths of the caramelised sugar.

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This should all be easy enough to write about – childhood reminiscing, recreating familiar foods in vegan form, yada yada yada, but I had to make the honeycomb thrice – threefold! – before I got it right and now I find myself losing valuable writing hours burrowing into lyrics websites looking for a stanza from a Limp Bizkit song that I can use as an allegory – is it that I really like Limp Bizkit (yes) or is it that I read the new Sally Rooney novel and I’m subconsciously bucking its high-minded walls of academic epistolography (possibly? how self-aware) or is it just some garden-variety ADHD hyperfocus on the wrong thing (let’s face it, probably) or is it that I’m five weeks into waiting out a lockdown, a lockdown that’s obviously the correct thing to do for the greater good and no real hardship to myself, but as such my imagination is growing wearier and wearier from over-use yet under-use simultaneously – yes, possibly that, too – but in fact, I think it’s really just that I’m still recovering from making three batches of honeycomb.

@hungryandfrozen

Vegan Hokey Pokey Ice Cream 🥲 I burnt so much honeycomb don’t let this flop besties #icecream #hokeypokey #vegan #nzfood #lockdownkitchen #nzlockdown

♬ Don’t Let Go (Love) – En Vogue

Every time I burnt that sugar it felt like part of my soul cauterised and fell off with it; but don’t let my rivers of hissing sugar and propensity for dramatics put you off: I suffered so that you don’t have to, and with a little patience this is genuinely quite straightforward, and you earn your heavenly reward in the form of a creamy tub of velvety-smooth ice cream with melting yet crunchy honeycomb and toffee dappled throughout. That being said, I wouldn’t recommend making this if you’re hungover or feeling fragile, or if you have small children rushing about, or indeed, if you are a small child yourself. This requires concentration (which is why it’s barely surprising I burnt the first two batches of sugar) and confidence, because you’re taking your boiling hot melted sugar and quickly, decisively, parting it two ways – into a sheet of clear, golden toffee (which will provide the requisite crunch that one seeks in all hokey pokey ice cream experiences) and into a billowing mushroom cloud of honeycomb (which slowly fades into the ice cream providing pockets of dissolving caramel.)

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Somewhere between frantically warning you of the dangers of handling hot sugar and reassuring you that there’s actually nothing to this, is my most important point: this vegan hokey pokey ice cream tastes SO GOOD, and as soon as you have that first mouthful you’ll not only be flush with nostalgia-flavoured serotonin you’ll also be absolutely reeling from the weight of your own competence – the most elusive flavour of all – and you’ll know it was all worth it (and maybe you’ll even hear Limp Bizkit singing this could be the one, I know I did.)

PS: if you really want to make life difficult for yourself, why not put on a double feature with my homemade vegan Jelly Tip ice cream recipe while you’re at it. Feel free to replace the vanilla ice cream mixture of that recipe with the coconut cream/coconut condensed milk of this recipe – for my money, it’s the superior method.

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Vegan Hokey Pokey Ice Cream

Lush, velvety vanilla ice cream with crunchy and melting honeycomb, the taste of your childhood and the promise of a brighter future, all at once. This takes some patience – specifically the double-sugar honeycomb and toffee aspect – and I recommend you read the recipe fully before embarking, although it’s a lot easier than the length of this makes it look – but obviously I wouldn’t lead you down this rocky path without good reason (that reason being: this ice cream is so delicious.) As always, my homemade ice cream recipes are and will forever be no-churn. Recipe by myself.

  • 1 x 320g tin sweetened condensed coconut milk
  • 2 x 400g tins full-fat coconut cream, refrigerated overnight
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 generous tablespoon golden syrup
  • 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • a pinch of salt, or to taste

1: First, the ice cream mixture. If you forget to put the coconut cream in the fridge the night before, at least try to get it cold for a few hours. Scoop the chilled, thick coconut cream from the top of the tins into a bowl (reserving the remaining coconut water for now) and using either electric beaters or a whisk and some energy, beat the coconut cream until thick and whipped looking. Pour in the sweetened condensed milk and beat everything again on high speed (or with your whisk) to thoroughly combine, then pour in the remaining coconut water from the tins and the vanilla and beat again. Apologies for how convoluted this sounds! You’re essentially just mixing your coconut products together and doing it this way ensures a creamy texture later on.

2: Pour this coconut mixture into a 1.5 litre capacity container, fix on the lid, and pop it in the fridge to let the flavour develop/mellow out while you make the honeycomb and toffee.

3: Now for the sugar. Before you do anything else, find two roasting trays or shallow, lipped baking trays and line them both with a large sheet of baking paper, and also measure the baking soda into a small cup or bowl so it’s ready to go when the sugar is melted. Place the sugar and golden syrup into a heavy saucepan and slowly melt it over a low heat, stirring constantly, until it’s gone from sugar to a gritty paste almost resembling peanut butter, to a melted puddle of caramel that’s starting to simmer around the edges. I feel the need to tell you that this is unbelievably hot so please pay attention and don’t – as if by automatism – lick the spoon.

4: Once it’s melted and just starting to simmer, remove the pan from the heat and quickly ladle a small quantity of the molten sugar – about 3 tablespoons to 1/4 cup but for goodness sake don’t try to measure it – onto one of the waiting paper-lined roasting trays.

5: Tip the baking soda into the remaining sugar syrup in the saucepan and stir it in briskly – the mixture will turn pale and billow spookily yet intriguingly upwards – once it starts doing this, carefully scrape as much as possible of your pale honeycomb onto the second paper-lined roasting tray. Now – pick up the first tray, confidently but respectfully, and tilt it gently from side to side to let the toffee spread out. You can try to do this with the honeycomb as well, but once that stuff is in place it doesn’t really like to move. Let both trays cool completely – this may not take very long or it might take about an hour, it all kind of depends on the weather and the vibe of the thing etc.

6: Use a wooden spoon or other implement of your choice to bash the cooled honeycomb and toffee – a very gratifying exercise after all that frantic activity earlier – breaking them up into small pieces. You can draw the four corners of the paper together and scrunch the honeycomb around to break it up further, I don’t recommend doing this with the toffee however, as it’ll stick together. Sprinkle a pinch of salt over your honeycomb and toffee crumbs (I find the saltiness works best distributed this way rather than directly in the ice cream mixture but, to be honest, it’s up to you, just put some salt somewhere at some point.) Remove your ice cream mixture from the fridge, tip in the honeycomb and toffee pieces, stir gently, and then place the container in the freezer for about six hours or overnight.

As with most homemade ice creams, this benefits from sitting around on the. bench for five to ten minutes to soften up a little before serving. Makes around 1.25 litres, give or take.

Notes:

  • The brand of sweetened condensed coconut milk you’ll probably be using – since it’s the only one I’ve ever seen on the shelf – is called Nature’s Charm, if it’s not in the regular canned milk section it’ll probably be in that weird dark corner where the supermarkets shunt all the vegan stuff.
  • The coconut cream needs to be full fat and it needs to be coconut cream and ideally there shouldn’t be water listed on the ingredients. For some reason the best, most consistent brand I’ve found for ice cream has been Pam’s.
  • If you use caster sugar the caramel stage will probably happen a lot quicker, in fact, I really should’ve used it, but since I’m already being difficult asking you to find sweetened condensed coconut milk I didn’t also want you to have to go out of your way to buy non-regular sugar.

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music lately:

Våren by Grieg, sung by Jane Powell and Jeanette MacDonald in the 1948 film Three Daring Daughters – Jane Powell always radiated sheer delightfulness and she was a comfort to me both in her films and in her general existence as one of our last remaining threads from the Golden Age of Hollywood; I would often look up her Wikipedia page just to be cheered by knowing she was still here and was terribly sad to learn of her death today. She’s mostly known for Royal Wedding and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers but this song – where she sings with the legendary 1930s soprano MacDonald – is pure magic.

Meet Me At Our Spot by The Anxiety, the collaboration between Willow Smith and Tyler Cole – the studio recording is amazing but this live version is just…magnificent, it’s so simple and relaxed and yet it hit me like an untethered fridge flying off the back of a truck going 100 miles per hour. Willow’s voice and energy and that chorus is simply everything!

America by Simon and Garfunkel – sometimes their mannered and careful enunciation sets my teeth on edge but this song specifically makes me feel positively unhinged levels of emotion – the eerie humming at the start merging with the tail end of the previous song immediately puts me in a trance, and when they get to the “hitch-hike from Saginaw” part I lose it every time (I actually looked Saginaw up on Wikipedia out of curiosity and started crying while reading facts about its municipalities and average precipitation, that’s how powerful this song is) and if I haven’t started crying by then I absolutely will be on the ground howling and beating the earth with my ineffectual fists by the time they make it to the New Jersey Turnpike.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Salted Caramel Ice Cream

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Why waste your breath chasing originality when you could instead obsess over one thing contingent only upon your getting sick of it, which does not seem likely anytime soon? I’m talking of course about salted caramel (but also I could be talking about, say, The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, a book that I loved as a kid and would re-read and re-read and every time I tried to get into literally any other book by CS Lewis it felt joyless and like hard work which, in the fullness of time, perhaps it really was, but anyway!)

Despite being, as a concept, utterly normal and unsurprising, salted caramel still manages to make eyes light up and taste buds limber up and for that – and its sheer deliciousness of course – I respect it. It’s truly the Saturday of foods, it’s switching the channel to find The Castle is on TV for the hundredth time and stopping to watch it for the hundredth time, it’s the culinary equivalent of the Grease megamix or Come On Eileen at the wedding dance floor, the food about which no one will ever say “oh god, not this again,” and even if they do try to front like they’re above it, a mere taste of whatever salted caramel confection is on offer will suddenly and stickily erase all attempts at snootiness.

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This salted caramel ice cream recipe is simple, has few ingredients, and does not require an ice cream machine – my personal vendetta against Big Ice Cream Machine guarantees you’ll never need one while I’m around – but, much like this blog post, there is a lengthy preamble to get through before you actually reach the gratifying part. By which I mean, you have to caramelise a can of condensed coconut milk by boiling it for several hours under a thick layer of water – while we fortunately live in a bountiful age where vegan condensed milk is a thing, we haven’t quite reached the convenience of ready-caramelised stuff yet (on the upside, it gives you something to complain about.) The process itself isn’t difficult or anything, but if you don’t have a crockpot you’ll need to situate yourself in or near the kitchen to make sure nothing burns or explodes, hence why I suggest making a double batch to give you maximum caramel output for your efforts.

@hungryandfrozen

vegan salted caramel ice cream🍦recipe at hungryandfrozen.com🍦SO GOOD🍦 #saltedcaramel #recipevideo #veganicecream #nochurn #icecream #pinkaesthetic

♬ Glory Box – Portishead

Once that step is complete it’s just a little mixing and freezing and you’ve got the creamiest, lushest ice cream rippled with waves of golden, burnished caramel. It tastes amazing, and the texture is glorious – chilling the coconut cream first and whipping it gives an airy denseness that I’ve been missing from my homemade ice creams; possibly the modest slosh of rum that I added helped the texture too, but you can leave the alcohol out and replace it with vanilla extract.

So no, this isn’t the first salted caramel recipe (or even the first vegan salted caramel ice cream recipe), nor will it be the last – and as long as salted caramel continues to taste this incredible, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

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Vegan Salted Caramel Ice Cream

Vegan, four ingredients, no-churn – of course! I’ll never ask you to use an ice-cream maker – and I know I say this every time, but this really is my best ice cream recipe yet. It’s creamy and soft and rich and rippled with caramel – truly the stuff of dreams. The caramel step is 1000% worth the wait, and I swear the process is a lot simpler than my wordy method makes it appear. Recipe by myself.

  • 1 x 320g tin sweetened condensed coconut milk
  • 1 x 400ml tin full-fat coconut cream
  • 1 tablespoon dark rum
  • salt, to taste

1: First, caramelise your condensed milk. A crockpot is ideal (and frankly, in my opinion, the best use for them) since all you have to do is cover the tin (with the label removed) in boiling water, cook on high for about four hours, then allow to cool completely, still in the crockpot. Otherwise, you can use the stovetop, bearing in mind that you’ll need to pay a lot more attention to it – place the tin, label removed, into a saucepan, cover completely with water, and boil for three hours, watching constantly to make sure nothing bad happens and that the water level doesn’t drop – my understanding is that if it evaporates enough so that the tin is no longer submerged, you could have a messy and dangerous explosion on your hands, so please consider yourself warned. While the condensed coconut milk is cooking, take this opportunity to place the can of coconut cream into the fridge to chill and firm up. Everything beyond this step is easy, I promise.

2: Once the can of caramelised condensed milk has cooled completely in whichever vessel of water it’s been bathing in, remove the tin and spoon about 3/4 of the now richly dark caramel into a mixing bowl. Take the coconut cream from the fridge and spoon the thickened coconut cream from the top into the mixing bowl. Using electric beaters (or a whisk and some exertion) beat the caramel and coconut cream together until thick and mousse-like, then tip in any remaining coconut water from the can of chilled coconut cream along with the rum if you’re using it and beat again to combine. Finally, beat in a good pinch of salt – bearing in mind that it’s always easier to add rather than subtract – and taste judiciously till you’re satisfied with the levels of salinity. (Also, you could consider stirring some salt into the condensed coconut milk before adding it to the coconut cream – or sprinkling more salt over the ice cream before freezing – or both! Your tastebuds will know what they want.)

3: Spatula this incredibly delicious mixture into a freezer-proof container and drizzle over the remaining 1/4 can of caramelised condensed coconut milk, using a skewer or something similar to ripple it throughout the cream. Cover the container and refrigerate for two hours – which I swear improves both the flavour and texture – and then, finally, freeze for around six hours or until solid. No need to tamper with it in any way during this time, although it’ll be easier to scoop if it sits on the bench for five or so minutes before serving.

Makes around 750ml. Since this is a fairly small quantity – about four servings – and since the caramel takes significant time to do its thing – I highly recommend making double quantities.

Notes:

  • There’s only one brand of condensed coconut milk on the shelves in New Zealand as far as I know, so that’s the one you’ll be getting. If you’re not vegan I guess there’s nothing stopping you from buying ready caramelised condensed non-vegan milk, but you know that already!
  • I said full-fat coconut cream and I meant it, if you choose low-fat or coconut milk then be it on your own head. I almost always get Pam’s, it’s inexpensive and does not appear to be watered down too much like some brands.
  • Instead of rum you can use bourbon, or brandy, or leave it out and add a teaspoon of vanilla instead.

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music lately:

Can I Help Me? (キャン・アイ・ヘルプ・ミー) by Plastics. Their 1980 debut album Welcome Plastics album is so good – I love the Apache-esque guitar lick and insouciant vibe of song in particular.

Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise. I’m re-watching Twin Peaks with my brother (who’s watching it for the first time) and, well, there’s never a wrong time to be reminded of this song, which is simply one of the best songs in the world!

Lot’s Wife from the Broadway musical Caroline, or Change performed by the supremely talented Sharon D. Clarke at the 2019 Olivier Awards; there’s this part in the middle where she just holds this huge note for what feels like hours, an absolute standing ovation of a performance.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Vegan Lemon Ice Cream [no-churn]

2 Comments

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It helps, when feeling on the back foot, to place what you’re doing within a wider context, to ground it, to lend precedence and credence. If you’re plagued with Main Character Syndrome like me you’ll already use this trick on a daily basis but for the rest of you it’s a great way to go from “another ice cream recipe? Really?” to “What do these artists have in common: Andy Warhol. Keith Haring. Yayoi Kusama. Gertrude Stein – that’s right, they incorporated repetition into their work and now they’re super iconic.” And then you point to yourself while saying “iconic”, thus indelibly cementing the association of you and that word. And then someone hands you a million-dollar record deal and it’s a hop skip and a jump to the top of the charts!

So yes, this lemon ice cream enters the room piggy-backing on my Twin Peaks Ice Cream method – which itself was a spin on the Feijoa Ice Cream method which was a vegan version of my original Feijoa Ice Cream! Because it’s such an easy and excellent way of making ice cream you can expect to see it pop up again sporadically in the future in further untold flavours, and should I ever want to repeat any of my existing ice cream flavour ideas I’ll probably be retroactively applying this method to them. (Although aquafaba will always have a place in my heart and my freezer.)

@hungryandfrozen

vegan lemon ice cream 🍋🍦 #tutorial #veganrecipes #nochurnicecream #icecream #lemon #vegan #nzfood #foodblogger #fyp #veganjunkfood

♬ Sweetness and Light – Lush

This iteration makes the most of the lemons which have happily burst into season just in time to give us some mid-winter sunshine. The scent of fresh lemon is enormously uplifting – although I take umbrage with the proliferation of TikTok videos claiming that eating lemon peel causes near-instant euphoria – and its sheer pure sourness matches well with a backdrop of lush coconut, giving a cloudless, sun-warmed beach towel vibe to even the frostiest of days. This is one of those recipes where you definitely still taste the coconut in the finished product but when the pairing is this perfect it’s a bonus, not a drawback. Unlike the Twin Peaks and Feijoa Ice Creams, I gave this mixture a brief go-over with electric beaters to aerate it before freezing. Where those ice creams were quite dense, this one is lighter and creamier – as befits its more delicate flavouring.

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You’d think ice cream would be the last thing anyone would want to make in the middle of winter but my favourite food knows no seasons, and the method is so relaxed and undemanding that I look forward to making this almost as much as eating it. And while there are few rewards for a life shackled by capitalism, a small good thing you can do as an adult to exert control and thumb your nose at practicality is to sit by a heater in your underwear and eat ice cream. I thoroughly recommend it. If you’re in the northern hemisphere and enjoying actual summer, I have to warn you that the seasonal inverse of this activity (eating a hot casserole in a swimming pool) just isn’t the same – but your time will come soon enough.

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Lemon Ice Cream

No-churn, three ingredients – vegan ice cream doesn’t get simpler than this. Recipe by myself.

  • 1 x 400ml tin full-fat coconut cream
  • 1 x 320g tin sweetened condensed coconut milk
  • 3/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice + the grated lemon zest
  • optional: a pinch of citric acid for extra zing

1: Place the coconut cream, sweetened condensed milk, and lemon juice and zest into a mixing bowl and beat on high for about three minutes using electric handheld beaters. If you don’t have electric beaters, just use a whisk and some upper body strength. You’re looking for an aerated texture – it won’t thicken or whip up but incorporating some air in it at this point will give a creamier texture later.

2: Stir in the citric acid if you’re using it and pour the mixture into a freezer-safe container. Place the lid on top and refrigerate the ice cream mixture for two hours before freezing for about six hours or overnight. It should be pretty scoopable straight from the freezer but may require a ten minute sit on the bench to soften first.

Makes around 1 litre.

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music lately:

Modern Dance by Pere Ubu. Jaunty and frug-y yet abrasive and awkward and coincidentally an excellent use of repetition? I love it!

You’re Dead by Nora Tanega. Cheerfully ominous, blithely jumping around time signatures, and exuding so much cool it could freeze a thousand tubs of ice cream.

There Will Be A Miracle by Mary Testa from Michael John LaChiusa’s 2005 off-Broadway musical See What I Wanna See, a mellow, tranquil oasis of calm in a fairly dark musical. The lyrics to this song are still dark but the melody is so gentle and Mary Testa repeating “there will be a miracle” is so soothing that you can zone out and vibe to it and feel pretty good about the world for a minute or two.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!