Rum Ice-cream and Christmas Pudding

I’ve been making this for a number of years now to accompany christmas pudding and as an alternative to hot rum sauce. I like the contrast between hot dark rich pudding and cold refreshing ice cream. It’s become something of a family tradition.

Here’s the recipe I used this year:

• 2 US cups of double cream (48% fat)
• 1 US cup of caster sugar
• 2 medium eggs
• 4 tablespoons of dark rum
• full fat milk (4% fat) to fill the 1/2 gallon freezer can to within 3cm of the top.

Results:

There was no problem in freezing the mix. I suspect this was helped by the rather chilly ambient temperatures on christmas day (“something negative” degrees celcius)

I think these amounts of sugar and rum are about the largest you could use and safely get a good freeze. After 48 hours in a freezer it was still just soft enough to scoop without needing to let it warm up.

There are probably 3 ways I would tinker with this recipe:

• Get rum with a stronger flavour.
• Slightly increase the rum (e.g 4.5 – 5 tbsp) and slightly reduce the sugar to compensate (e.g. 1 US cup less 1-2 tbsp).
• Consider introducing a small amount of golden caster or even muscovado to enhance the rum effect without the problems of increased alcohol.

Normally I increase the cream content in recipes which don’t contain fruit, but in this case I thought that after a big rich meal and to serve with a rich pudding I’d try and keep it more refreshing.