Lemon Meringue Ice Cream Cake

To be honest, this Lemon Meringue Ice Cream Cake is nothing more than an assembly job, consisting of just creme fraiche, bought meringues and lemon curd on a sponge cake base.  However, it's been a useful dessert to have in the freezer, especially during the sort of summer we're having at the moment. It slices easily from frozen, and only needs a few minutes to soften enough to eat. I found that the meringue pieces become less noticeable with time, but it still tastes good.

If you want to make it more complicated, you can make your own cake layer for the base - and I have done this in the past - but a good bought madeira (or even ginger) cake is perfectly acceptable. Another good addition, if you're only feeding adults, is a little limoncello sprinkled on the base, and stirred into the lemon curd. Homemade lemon curd would, of course, vastly improve the dessert too!

Coffee and Chocolate Semifreddo

I've never really felt the need to make ice cream at home. We eat relatively little, unless there's a really hot summer, and even then, our simple tastes have always been met by what's available in the supermarkets. This has meant that I've never bought an ice cream maker, which takes me into a perpetual loop, because if I do see a recipe I like the look of, I haven't got a machine to churn it in. As a final reason for not making it (and I think that's enough excuses) - there's hardly ever enough room in the freezer to put a large bowl, if I want to beat an ice cream mix by hand during the freezing process.

However, I don't like to pass up the monthly We Should Cocoa challenge (rules here, on Chocolate Log Blog), and this month Elizabeth from Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary has set us the challenge of making either ice cream or toppings for ice cream, using chocolate in some form. So I managed to clear a little space in the freezer and decided to look for recipes which didn't need churning or beating while freezing. I was delighted to find this recipe, on the BBC Good Food site, for a semifreddo which is frozen in a loaf tin and doesn't set really hard, so it can be served straight from the freezer. As the cream and egg whites in the recipe are beaten separately, there is a lot of air in the mixture which is what prevents it setting too solidly. The only change I made to the recipe was to use 100g of plain chocolate instead of a Toblerone bar.

I had already made a chocolate fudge sauce (175g plain chocolate, and 30g butter were melted together, then 2 tablespoons of golden syrup and 3 tablespoons of milk were beaten in). I was going to serve this warm with the dessert, but knew that it would also set solidly on anything cold. I intended to drizzle this artistically over the block of ice cream but a combination of too large a hole in my piping bag, and panic because the semifreddo was melting quite quickly meant I ended up with rough squiggles instead. I did manage to scatter some chocolate coffee beans on top before the chocolate set.

The family were very impressed with the texture of this semifreddo - it was very light and melt-in-the-mouth soft - and I had been careful to chop the chocolate really finely so that there were no large hard lumps to crunch down on. The basic recipe could easily be adapted for other flavours, but it should be noted that the recipe does contain raw eggs so may not be suitable for everyone.