If you’re looking for a way to cool off with some homemade ice cream but didn’t think you could make it without a costly machine, Cheryl, from Ayrshire, Scotland, with her “wee humble” kitchen, has a tasty and simple recipe for you. It allows for a bit of creativity and could be a fun activity for parents and kids to do together over the summer break.
“I made a lovely tablet ice cream. This is such a simple recipe, which requires only three ingredients for the base…which will give you a lovely vanilla ice cream,” Cheryl says on her What’s For Tea? YouTube channel. “This is a beautiful ice cream. Ever so easy to make, and it’s lovely and smooth, but it’s a wee bit salty. So, just be mindful of that. But it’s more like gelato. It’s so smooth and creamy.”
What is Scottish tablet?
Aside from the ice cream base, made from everyday ingredients, Cheryl’s recipe calls for Scottish tablet, a hard, buttery, fudge-like confection, for additional flavor. The problem is that in the United States, the only place you can get it is from online specialty shops. Some similar sweet treats you can buy in the U.S. are brown sugar fudge and maple sugar candy. If you’re in Canada, Quebec sucre à la crème (also known as maple fudge) is another comparable option.
How to make Cheryl’s Scottish ice cream
1. Prepare the heavy whipping cream
In the video, Cheryl refers to the cream as double cream, but in the U.S., it’s the same as heavy whipping cream. “Now, you want to whisk this until it’s nice and thick and starting to form, you know, quite stiff peaks on the surface,” Cheryl says. “You know, you don’t want to overwhip this. You don’t want it to be like butter, but you do want it quite firm.”
2. Add more ingredients
“I’m going to add a couple of teaspoons of vanilla and then the sweetened condensed milk as well, and also a good pinch of salt,” Cheryl continues. “So I ended up with a sort of salted caramel flavor at the end. You just want to whip all these together until it goes nice and thick and light and fluffy, just like this.”
Then add a pinch of salt and about a cup and a half of tablet or, if you don’t have any, substitute chocolate chips, small pieces of cake, crushed cookies, sugar fudge, a smashed-up Heath bar, brown sugar fudge, maple sugar candy, or sucre à la crème.
3. Freeze mixture
Cheryl then pours the mixture into two-pound loaf tins. “You just want to make sure you drop that in there nice and gently,” she says. “You don’t have to smooth it out or anything. Just make sure it’s in all of your corners so that it freezes nice and evenly.”
Shopping list:
- Vanilla extract (3 tsp)
- Tablet or a substitute (2 cups)
- Heavy whipping cream (3 cups)
- Sweetened condensed milk (14 oz)
