Strawberry and Elderflower Ice Cream recipe.....

In between telling you about my craft room I thought I would share some of the other things I've been up to.

I manage to beat the blackbirds to the most of the berries in my garden this year! I net some of the bushes but if I leave the tiniest gap they are in there when I'm not looking. I hang CD's around but I think they just check they haven't got berry juice on their faces in them!

When I went down a few weeks ago I thought a tiny bird had got trapped under the frame of netting over the strawberries & was panicking because I'd caught him red handed. But, as I bent down to lift the frame up it squeezed through less than an inch square hole in the net. It wasn't trapped at all. Cheeky thing! Not sure what bird it was. I'll have to buy even smaller holed net next year.

My soft fruit garden

Although my soft fruit is coming to an end this is what I did about 3 weeks ago with some of my strawberries.

We have quite a large strawberry patch which produce a bowlful every other day during the season. We all love strawberries in our house. I usually make scones but my youngest said he fancied some strawberry ice cream for a change.

I'm all for quick recipes and shortcuts as I don't want to be stuck in the kitchen on beautiful sunny days. I don't have an ice cream maker so I found a Strawberry Ice Cream recipe online that seemed quite straight forward without one.

The recipe says to make a sugar syrup first. This was going to take awhile to make & time to allow it to cool down so I thought.....I wonder if my Elderflower syrup I made in May would do? So, I gave it a go.

This is my Strawberry and Elderflower Ice Cream recipe -

1 lb (500g) strawberries roughly chopped

175 ml elderflower syrup (homemade using 1kg sugar approx 30 heads & 1 1/2 ltr water 3 lemons)

300 ml whipping cream

Blend strawberries with a Braun hand held blender.

Mix with elderflower syrup.

Whip cream until it holds it shape.

Fold strawberry mixture into cream.

Pour into freezer container & freeze.

When it starts to set around the edges (approx 1 hour) pour back into a bowl and whisk.Return to freezer. Approx every hour fork the frozen outer edge towards the middle and mix. Repeat a couple of times until evenly frozen. Keep in freezer until required allowing about half an hour to soften before serving.

Ta da!

This is quite a hard setting ice cream. Mine turned out a bit "icy" but when allowed to thaw it smoothed out a bit. I think I should have whisked a few more times rather than forking it. It got the thumbs up from a teenager so it couldn't have been all that bad!

I might make it again but try it with raspberries next time.

Zx