Salted Caramel Maple Ice-Cream (recipe) with pecans and a slice of Torta Caprese.  Both Thermomix recipes. The ice-cream is brilliant.  Best ice-cream ever.  There are really no other words to describe it, just try to make it yourself.  If you don’t have an ice-cream maker (which I don’t), you can still adapt the recipe for your stove-top then do the hand-churn every few hours. Toss in the chopped pecans (toasted is best) in the last churn.  Trust me, it is absolutely worth it for this ice-cream. The recipe suggests chopped chocolate.  Don’t do it unless you really want the sugar rush.  The pecans however make it perfect.  Or do both if that kind of thing tickles your fancy. A little note though.  I have never made ice-cream before and it took three days for the ice-cream to freeze to a gelato consistency.  At first I was concerned the custard wasn’t thick enough, but it seems ice-cream custard bases are very runny.  Just barely coats the back of a spoon. Also important is the container you freeze it in.  I tried freezing it in one of those microwaveable 360 containers from IKEA.  Seems they insulate a little better than I thought.  The second batch of ice-cream I made got frozen in a plastic ice-cream container and that froze solid in the expected time-frame. Now the cake.  I was somewhat disappointed by the Torta Caprese.  It was meant to be baked at 180C which I did and it came out dry. There was a note in the recipe which I didn’t see until after that said to drop it to 160C if you have a ‘very hot oven’.  Correct me if I’m wrong but very hot or not, 180C is still 180C.  I presume they meant fan-forced which would make lowering the temperature by 20C make sense, but I didn’t see any other indications that the recipes were written for non-fan-forced ovens. I had a taste of this cake at the Thermomix cooking class the other week though and it was moist.  But to be quite honest, Clotilde Dusoulier’s Melt-in-your-Mouth Chocolate Cake or Anouchka’s Chocolate Cake from Joanne Harris’ The French Kitchen are far better examples of that kind of thing. As a side note, the Torta Caprese called for grating chocolate in the Thermomix.  This was an interesting experience.  I have crushed ice in the Thermomix before for sorbets, but never done chocolate before.  They really need to put some sort of warning on that process because by jebus was it loud.  Hard chocolate flung against stainless steel is not a fun sound.  Ice will shatter, chocolate does not.  I needed to borrow Eric’s over the ear headphones to muffle it ever so slightly until the hard part was over.  The chocolate was perfectly grated at the end of the process, but it so wasn’t worth it.

Salted Caramel Maple Ice-Cream (recipe) with pecans and a slice of Torta Caprese.  Both Thermomix recipes.

The ice-cream is brilliant.  Best ice-cream ever.  There are really no other words to describe it, just try to make it yourself.  If you don’t have an ice-cream maker (which I don’t), you can still adapt the recipe for your stove-top then do the hand-churn every few hours. Toss in the chopped pecans (toasted is best) in the last churn.  Trust me, it is absolutely worth it for this ice-cream.

The recipe suggests chopped chocolate.  Don’t do it unless you really want the sugar rush.  The pecans however make it perfect.  Or do both if that kind of thing tickles your fancy.

A little note though.  I have never made ice-cream before and it took three days for the ice-cream to freeze to a gelato consistency.  At first I was concerned the custard wasn’t thick enough, but it seems ice-cream custard bases are very runny.  Just barely coats the back of a spoon.

Also important is the container you freeze it in.  I tried freezing it in one of those microwaveable 360 containers from IKEA.  Seems they insulate a little better than I thought.  The second batch of ice-cream I made got frozen in a plastic ice-cream container and that froze solid in the expected time-frame.

Now the cake.  I was somewhat disappointed by the Torta Caprese.  It was meant to be baked at 180C which I did and it came out dry.

There was a note in the recipe which I didn’t see until after that said to drop it to 160C if you have a ‘very hot oven’.  Correct me if I’m wrong but very hot or not, 180C is still 180C.  I presume they meant fan-forced which would make lowering the temperature by 20C make sense, but I didn’t see any other indications that the recipes were written for non-fan-forced ovens.

I had a taste of this cake at the Thermomix cooking class the other week though and it was moist.  But to be quite honest, Clotilde Dusoulier’s Melt-in-your-Mouth Chocolate Cake or Anouchka’s Chocolate Cake from Joanne Harris’ The French Kitchen are far better examples of that kind of thing.

As a side note, the Torta Caprese called for grating chocolate in the Thermomix.  This was an interesting experience.  I have crushed ice in the Thermomix before for sorbets, but never done chocolate before.  They really need to put some sort of warning on that process because by jebus was it loud.  Hard chocolate flung against stainless steel is not a fun sound.  Ice will shatter, chocolate does not.  I needed to borrow Eric’s over the ear headphones to muffle it ever so slightly until the hard part was over.  The chocolate was perfectly grated at the end of the process, but it so wasn’t worth it.