Marmalade Ice Cream

Dinner was cooked, eaten, and mostly appreciated (not everyone loves pomegranate as much as I do - mother, I'm looking at you), my oven behaved itself, and after everyone left before the washing up it only took an hour and a bit to clear up.

The thing I was most pleased with was the marmalade ice cream, I've made it before with a Seville orange marmalade, it had a great texture but the flavour was a bit overwhelming on it's own. This time I used the blood orange and vanilla marmalade I made a few weeks ago, on it's own the marmalade (how many times can I say marmalade in a single sentence?) is sweeter than I prefer for toast but in the ice cream it came into it's own. The orange flavour is brilliant, the slightly bitter marmaladey edge makes it interesting, and altogether it was a great success with either slices of oranges sprinkled with nutmeg, or pecan pie (and would probably be even better with walnut).

The recipe came from a Sarah Raven book and is delightfully simple (she's brilliant for ice cream recipes, I've found some crackers in her books) it's 300 ml's each of double cream and full fat natural yoghurt, 350g of marmalade, and 3 tablespoons of orange juice all churned in an ice cream maker for 20 minutes. It's worth blitzing the marmalade in a food blender for a minute to make sure there are no big chunks of peel left, or putting it through a sieve if you want no peel at all. And that's it. A few hours in the freezer to make sure it's hard enough and it's ready to eat, the ice cream maker isn't even necessary, it could just be mixed up and go straight into tubs in the freezer.