Throughout the summer I can literally eat my way through gallons of ice-cream! But it can also be a season where tummy issues come into play again with more travel and less of a routine playing havoc with our gut health. Because of this, I’m always thinking about fun/hacky ways to get a little more fibre into my diet where possible. Ice-cream just happens to be one of them!

Now I’m a dairy kinda girl and love me some real, creamy ice-cream as a dessert or mid afternoon cool down so I stick to the Oxford dictionary definition of ice-cream!

Ice cream, mid 18th century alteration of iced cream:

A soft, sweet frozen food made with milk and cream and typically flavoured with vanilla, fruit, or other ingredients.

This is the easiest way to make gorgeous, flavoursome, creamy ice-cream!

There are just 3 super accessible ingredients which make up the basic ice-cream recipe-

• Double Cream
• Condensed Milk
• Vanilla Essence

Go for as a good a cream as you can find! I use Yeo Valley Double Cream and on weekends buy fresh cream from my local Farmers Market.

To the basic recipe you can add whatever you like! Buckwheat grouts, sprouted quinoa, seeds, fruits, nuts, crumbled up sourdough bread, be as mad as you like! Ice-cream is a really fun way to play around with texture.

I love the following combinations-

1. Sicilian Hazelnut & Banana Ice-cream
2. Chia Raspberry Ice-cream
3. Puffed Honey Oats & Oatcake Ice-cream
4. Blackberry & Ginger Biscuit Ice-cream

The base ingredients for all flavours

1. 600ml Organic Double Cream
2. 1 Can Condensed Milk (I buy mine from Wholefoods but it’s available in the baking section of most shops)
3. 1 - 2 tsp Vanilla Essence

Sicilian Hazelnut & Banana Ice-cream

1. 2 Bananas, broken up into chunks with your hands.
2. 125g Ground Sicilian Hazelnuts (available from Planet Organic, Wholefoods & Amazon)

Chia Raspberry Ice-cream

1. 1 - 2 Punnets Raspberries (2 if you like your ice-cream really fruity, 1 if you prefer it creamier)
2. 4 - 6 Tablespoons Chia Seeds

Puffed Honey Oat & Oatcake Ice-cream

1. Half a Bowl of Rude Health’s Puffed Honey Oats
2. 1 Pack of Nairn’s Organic Gluten-free Oatcakes, broken up into small pieces using your hands.

Blackberry & Ginger Biscuit Ice-cream

1. 1 Pack of Ginger Biscuits (I use Kent & Fraser which are available on Ocado and from loads other places), broken up into small pieces with your hands.
2. 1 - 2 Punnets Blackberries (2 if you like your ice-cream really fruity, 1 if you prefer it creamier).

Utensils

1. Electric whisk 
2. Big Bowl
3. Big Spoon
4. A tin for storing your ice-cream in (I use my bread loaf tins)

Method

1. Pour the cream, milk and vanilla essence into the bowl.
2. Lower your hand held whisk into the mixture and turn it on to a relatively high speed.
3. After 1 - 2 minutes you can increase the speed to just under its highest speed setting, moving the whisk through the mixture as you go.
4. We need to get our ice-cream to a crème fraîche like consistency before pouring it into our ice-cream tin. As the cream begins to thicken a little move the ice-cream mixture around the bowl to see how close you’re getting to this crème fraîche like consistency. This can take up to 5 minutes.
5. When you’re almost at the required consistency (about 30 seconds away) add the remaining ingredients for the flavour you’ve chosen.
6. Lower your whisk into the mixture again except this time turn it up to a medium speed. You just want to whisk the remaining ingredients through for about 30 seconds so that they’re dispersed through the ice-cream nicely.
7. Make sure not to liquidise the fruits with the whisk. That’s why the lower speed is important here. Shredding up the fruits slightly is nice but you want chunks of fruit going through your ice-cream for texture when you’re eating it.
8. Now all that’s left to do is to transfer your ice-cream into the tin, cover twice with cling film or tin foil and pop it into the freezer for at least 3 hours before you indulge in your first bowl!
9. If you’d like to make your ice-cream look even prettier when it comes out of the freezer just scatter left over ingredients on top before covering the ice-cream for freezing.
10. Take your ice-cream out of the freezer 10 - 15 minutes before serving.

If you'd like to follow me making mine you can do so by clicking on The Happy Tummy Co. YouTube Channel.

I generally make up lots of different ones at a time to have in the freezer when friends come around. A table full of different ice-cream choices with bowls and spoons makes for the happiest people!

Don’t worry about it if you feel you’ve over whisked or liquidised your fruit. Practise makes perfect and either way, your own homemade ice-cream will taste delicious!

Happy ice-cream making!! :)

Karen x