Under the Blue Gum tree

Last week I had what is probably best described as a bit of a “Heston” moment in the kitchen. The theme for this month’s Bloggers Scream For Ice Cream Challenge hosted by Kavey Eats is Japan so I wanted to see if I could recreate sushi in ice-cream form. Yes, you read it right. Sushi ice-cream.

To be honest, this is probably a one-time-only offering as it was a little stressful. Although it didn’t turn out quite as I had pictured in my head, if you had seen the state of me and my kitchen mid-creation you would be surprised I managed to produce anything to photograph at all.

For the pseudo nori sheets, I made some fruit leathers according to a recipe from Alys Fowler’s book “The Thrifty Forager.” These are so lovely and easy to make. You stew four cups of chopped fruit with a cup of juice or water (I used plums and pomegranate juice), puree, and then spread on baking sheets to dry out in a low oven.

For the filling I made a rice pudding ice-cream from a Michael Caines recipe. Now this really was a revelation as rice pudding has, not to put too finer point on it, historically only served to make me barf. Together with porridge, it is one of the only foodstuffs I really and truly cannot stand. But this recipe, well, wow! I had to stop myself eating the rice pudding out of the pan as, laced with coconut and vanilla, it was absolutely nothing like the tinned monstrosity of my youth. And it made the perfect filling for my sushi.

Now, I had anticipated that I would be able to roll the fruit leathers and ice-cream around the fruity filling (I used three different types of melon) but that ended in tears and a big sticky mess. So I ended up cheating and wrapping strips of fruit leathers around the inside of cookie cutters and then filling with icecream and fruit before popping back in the freezer to firm up. Next time I would soak the melon in a little vodka to stop it from freezing so hard. But somehow I don’t think there will be a next time. But I have learnt that maybe I do like rice pudding after all. So the effort was worthwhile.