Fig Ice Cream

Making your own ice cream is so rewarding and fun. The world's your oyster when it comes to flavour combinations, and there are different ways to make your ice cream base. For example, some recipes require making a custard-type base using eggs (such as in my pistachio ice cream recipe) and others are more basic like a sherbet using only water and milk. These will offer differing levels of creaminess.

Recently I wanted to experiment with making a creamy ice cream without having to faff about using eggs, basically I wanted to be lazier and also use less ingredients. And here is the result, a rich and creamy ice cream just using sweetened condensed milk and whole milk. I used dried figs and cinnamon as my flavours, which is an amazing combination, but it'd work with millions of other flavours too. I'll definitely be experimenting more with it. Good thing is you don't even need an ice cream machine to get good results, you just need to be aware of a few tips if you're unfamiliar with making handmade ice cream, so I'll be sure to put those with the recipe.

FIG ICE CREAM

Ingredients:

200g dried figs
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 cups whole milk
1 tin of sweetened condensed milk (397g)
(Almond flakes and extra chopped dried figs as optional garnish)

Method:

Add the dried figs, cinnamon and half of the milk (2 cups) to a saucepan.
Bring to boil, simmer over a medium heat for about 10 minutes until the figs soften.
Remove from heat and let cool. Blend until smooth.
Now add the rest of the milk (2 cups) and sweetened condensed milk.
Whisk well.
Pour into a shallow, freeze-proof container.
Place in freezer, follow instructions below.
Serve.

Tips:

To ensure a creamier ice cream, remove the ice cream from the freezer as it just starts to freeze around the edges. Blend or beat the mixture to remove the lumps and incorporate air into it. It's best to do this often until it's too frozen to handle anymore. I tend to do it every hour as it takes my ice cream several hours to set, but your timing might be different. You could skip all of this and just leave it to freeze, but the result will be more icy. Also, handmade ice cream tends to freezer quite hard, so you'll need to let it stand at room temperature for at least 10 minutes before attempting to serve it.