Amaretti Ice Cream

After branching out beyond a basic vanilla ice cream with the Coffee & Walnut Ice Cream I made last week,  I promised myself I'd be a bit more adventurous and try a few more recipes from the excellent book Ice Cream Made Easy: Homemade Recipes for Ice Cream Machines.

This time I attempted Amaretti Ice Cream, mainly because I thought it would go nicely with Poached Pears.

The only problem was, I didn't have any ready made fresh custard. "Can I use cooled down custard made from powder as a replacement for the fresh custard? Will it give the same results? Will it freeze properly? And will it give the correct consistency?" I thought I'd give it a go... some of the other recipes also call for cold fresh custard and it would be good to know if cold Bird's powdered custard would work just as well. Some people can't eat eggs either so another reason to discover if the substitute works in homemade ice cream.

Amaretti are traditional Italian biscuits made with apricot kernels and they taste like almonds. This recipe calls for the crunchy variety which are delicious dunked in tea or coffee or even red wine. You can also get soft Amaretti biscuits which usually come wrapped up like large bon-bons but I don't think they would work for this recipe.

 

You have to crush the Amaretti biscuits up for this recipe... the plastic bag I was using was getting holes in it so I didn't crush them up as much as I would have liked but I needn't have worried because the ice cream maker does a good job of getting them all down to a nice small and uniform size while it's mixing and freezing. Next time I think I will just bash them in a bowl with the end of the rolling pin...or maybe that could get messy?!
Again, after 50 minutes, this ice-cream was soft serve so I put it in an empty ice cream tub and popped it in the freezer for a couple of hours to harden up a bit more.

There was plenty left over even after serving with the poached pears so the following night I served the Amaretti ice cream with whipped cream and chocolate flakes.