Every week at work, I come up with a new flavoured soft serve to sit alongside the classic vanilla in the soft serve machine.
Over time, I’ve tried to make the flavours as fun as possible by adding different components to the soft serve.
You can’t put anything chuky, chewy, swirled or syrupy into the soft serve machine, so I make different elements that get layered up into the soft serve as it’s pulled from the machine.
I’ve made flavours like chocolate peppermint, pavlova, with passionfruit swirls and chunks of meringue, a white chocolate soft serve with salted caramel and cornflake crunch, or my favourite so far, the Snickers flavour, with chocolate peanut butter soft serve, salted caramel sauce, roasted peanuts and chocolate nougat.
When I come up with flavours now, I’ve fallen into a routine where each flavour has a base ice cream, a sauce or fudge element, and a chunky or crunchy element. I find that it makes the flavours so much more realistic and fun in your mouth.
So when I decided to make a Nutella ice cream, it couldn’t just be a Nutella flavoured ice cream base – that’s too boring. It had to be a vanilla base, with lots of fat swirls of Nutella layered through it, and I decided to throw big chunks of Ferrero Rocher in there too, because who doesn’t love Ferreros?!
And man, was it good. Homemade vanilla ice cream tastes so amazing, and the Nutella freezes up in the ice cream and is cold but then melts in your mouth, and the Ferreros add crunch… it’s so, so good. You have to try this one! X
- FOR THE ICE CREAM BASE:
- 1 cup milk (250ml)
- ¾ cup caster (superfine) sugar (150g)
- 1 vanilla bean
- Pinch of salt
- 2 cups cream (500ml)
- 6 egg yolks
- FOR THE MIX-INS:
- 200g Nutella
- 12 Ferrero Rocher truffles, chopped
- Put the milk, sugar and salt in a small saucepan.
- Split the vanilla bean lengthwise, scrape out the seeds and add them to the milk, along with the pod.
- Place the saucepan over a high heat and bring the milk to just under the boil.
- Remove from the heat, cover the pot and set aside to infuse for an hour.
- Pour the cream into a large heatproof bowl. Place a strainer over the cream and set aside.
- In a separate medium heatproof bowl, whisk the egg yolks lightly. Slowly pour the infused milk into the yolks, whisking the entire time, until combined.
- Return this mixture to the pot and cook, stirring constantly with a spatula, until the mixture reaches 82 C (180 F) or until it coats the back of a spoon.
- Remove from the heat and pour through the strainer into the cream.
- Stir the custard and cream together, then mix in the vanilla extract.
- Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until cold (preferably overnight).
- Once the custard is cold, churn in your ice cream maker.
- Pour one third of the ice cream into a freezer-safe container and top with a third of the Nutella and a third of the Ferrero Rocher. Repeat the layering process until all the elements have been used up.
- Freeze the ice cream to set it, then enjoy. Makes 2 litres + mix ins.
- Happy baking!
Vanilla ice cream base adapted from David Lebovitz via this recipe.