Summer’s last gasp

I know I declared that soup season had arrived in my last blog, but it’s summer bank holiday weekend (in England), so what do we need? Ice cream, of course. Even if it is raining here.


I last made this recipe ages ago, but I was reminded about it by a twitter discussion about ice cream makers, which several of us have been tempted by, but few of us have space for. The beauty of this recipe is that you don’t need an ice cream maker.


So, here we go: Chocolate and hazelnut gelato. The recipe is here: https://www.bbcnordic.com/recipes/?recipe=bacio-chocolate-and-hazelnut-gelato Don’t worry if you can’t get baci chocolates, I’ve always made it without (even though I love baci, I never seem to be able to find them over here). Owing to a strange series of online delivery substitutions, I do however have a lot of chocolate chips, so I decided to add some of those instead.


Start by caramelising your hazelnuts. It’s not clear in the recipe if you should put the icing sugar and nuts into a cold pan, or one that’s already warm. I started with a cold one, it seemed to work. It seemed to do nothing for ages, and then the caramelisation happened quite suddenly. Once lovely and golden, set them aside for later.

Caramelised hazelnuts

Whisk the double cream, condensed milk and vanilla essence (I’m fairly sure I’ve made this without the vanilla essence, although I used it this time) to soft peak stage – I’m never quite sure what a ‘soft peak’ looks like, so this is my interpretation of it, and it seemed to work:

Soft peaks? 

Then, whisk in the cocoa powder. It was at this point that I discovered that I had only half the amount specified in the recipe. In the spirit of lockdown cookery, I decided to proceed anyway, and just add some more chocolate chips. So, in went two 100g bags of chocolate chips (and I still have two left), and most of the caramelised hazelnuts. Pour the mixture into a container/containers, top with the remaining hazelnuts, and freeze for several hours.

Ready for the freezer

Especially considering how easy this is to make, it tastes very good – it would have been more chocolatey if I’d had the right amount of cocoa powder, but the extra chocolate chips make up for that, the caramelised hazelnuts are lovely, and the ice cream has a lovely smooth texture.



 It's still raining, by the way.