In our last vacation to New Zealand, we had a fantastic time. It was beautiful everywhere and some days the the weather was perfect! By perfect I mean hot in the day and cold at night. Which meant that you could enjoy an ice-cream in the day and a warm bowl of soup or hot pasta or even or some delicious fried seafood at night! And the one ice-cream that we all loved hands down was hokey pokey. It is a New Zealand specialty and very hard to find in Singapore. So when I purchased yet another accompaniment to my Kitchen Aid mixer - the ice cream making bowl, the first thing my kids asked for was Hokey Pokey ice cream!

The Kitchen Aid device is pretty good and I have used it twice in a span of three weeks so that does explain my excitement with it. Its very easy to use. Just remember to put it in the freezer for atleast 15 hours before you use it to ensure that the liquid inside it has frozen completely. Another important thing I learnt when I used it for the first time was that the ice cream base needs to be nicely chilled before adding it to the ice cream maker attachment. That will make the difference between a runny or a soft set ice cream. Now, the ice cream that come out of this machine is soft and does need to set in the refrigerator for sometime. I also read up a bit online and discovered that hot weather like we have in Singapore will always result in a softer texture than if this were to be used in a slightly colder place. Well I really can't complain about that because this hot weather is also the prefect weather to enjoy the ice cream!

This ice cream is just honeycomb mixed into plain vanilla ice cream but the end result is very tasty and very addictive. So the plan was to make enough honeycomb to use for the ice cream and to use the remaining honeycomb for milkshake the next day. I had never made honeycomb before and never made ice cream from scratch so it was a time for double experiment. Nigella Lawson has this super easy recipe for Hokey Pokey that I had seen a long time back when I was watching one of her shows on TV. Her recipes usually work out well for me so I decided to give it a shot. It was surprisingly easy to make and tasted as per my expectations. One Down!

The ice cream was a bit tricky though. There are so many recipes out there ..... and most of them are similar in technique but vary immensely in the ratio of ingredients to be used. They can range from all cream based to cream plus half-and-half or milk plus cream or just half-and-half for the custard base. Some of the stuff seemed shockingly unhealthy and I was wondering if I could make them a staple in my repertoire. After browsing through several sites and reading up as much as I could, I finally decided to use a ratio that seemed relatively healthy to me and I hoped it would give me the texture I was looking for. One day I hope to come up with a recipe that is healthy enough for me to make it often. Since I was using honeycomb, I also decided to reduce the amount of sugar in my base to avoid the ice cream being very sweet.

Ice Cream

Ingredients:

2 cups whole milk

1 cup heavy cream

5 egg yolks

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 vanilla bean

Honeycomb - 1/2 batch prepared in the following recipe

Method:

1. Set a sauce pan over medium high heat and bring the milk, cream and split vanilla bean to a boil.

2. Beat the egg yolks and sugar in a mixing bowl till the mixture is pale in color.

3. Pour 2 cups of the milk and cream mixture into the egg yolks and sugar while the mixer is running. Once the hot milk is combined with the yolks and the temperature of the yolks has risen without cooking the eggs, our this mixture back into the saucepan and cook over medium low heat.

4. Continue stirring the mixture till it thickens. It will be done when the mixture coats the back of a wooden spoon.

5. Strain the mixture through a sieve and allow it to cool to room temperature. Add half of the honeycomb and transfer it to a refrigerator to chill completely.

6. Once the mixture is well chilled, add the remaining honeycomb to it. Pour it slowly into the ice cream machine while it is running.

7. Let it churn on setting 1 till the ice cream starts to thicken and grow in volume. Churn for 20-30 minutes till the desired texture is reached.

8. Transfer the ice cream to a container and place it in the freezer for a few hours. Once set, scoop out of the container and serve!

Honeycomb (based on this recipe from Nigella Lawson)

Ingredients:

1/2 cup superfine sugar

4 tablespoons golden syrup or light corn syrup

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

Method:

1. Put the sugar and syrup in a saucepan and stir together to mix. Avoid stirring when the pan is on heat.

2. Place the pan on the heat and let the mixture first melt, then turn to goo and then to a bubbling mass the color of maple syrup - this could take 3-4 minutes.

3. Turn off the heat, whisk baking soda into the syrup. It will immediately turn into a frothy mass of sugar.

4. Turn this out onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or with greased foil. Let it cool down. Bash into smaller pieces and store in an airtight container.