S’long to South Africa with lime and blueberry ice-cream

I have been in South Africa for six years now. I came here to do my PhD and liked it so much I stayed on to do a post-doc. It really is an amazing country with diverse landscapes and diverse cultures. I could write a ten page testimonial about why it is great here but those of you that have been to SA will already know what I mean and those of you that haven’t should really get on a plane and experience it for yourselves rather than listen to me wax lyrical about how awesome it is. Sadly, next week I will be leaving South Africa and so to make the departure a little bit less sad, I thought I would make some ice-cream (that always cheers me up!).

The flavour I decided to go for is based on a desert I had when I was a kid. I have no idea how old I was but I remember going round to one of my parents friends houses for lunch and having the most amazing lime and blueberry cheesecake. Given that it was probably over 20 years since I ate this fabled desert and I still fantasize about it, I thought I should bite the bullet and try and re-create it with a Triple Motion twist.

Unfortunately the day I decided to crank there was not a lime to be found anywhere in Stellenbosch. This required emergency recipe intervention and so I ended up using preserved lime juice to flavour the mix and then because I found I needed  bit more citrusy zing I added lemon zest. The recipe for the lime and lemon ice-cream was then as follows:

• 8 tbs lime juice
• zest of 1 lemon
• ½ cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 cups cream
• 2 cups full-fat milk

I though possibly mixing the blueberries in with the citrus combo might homogenize the flavours too much so instead I just softened the blueberries in a pan with a little sugar, crushed them to release the juices and then stirred through the ice-cream after it was cranked and ready to go in the freezer to finish setting.

The cranking its self took a REALY long time (nearly an hour), and it was not even that hot. Not sure why this was but we kept our selves amused by drinking wine and taking in the view so it was not all bad. I was pretty pleased with the end result – good distinction between the clean lemon and lime flavours of the ice-cream and the slightly sticky much sweeter blueberry swirl. I think it still would have been better to go with 100% lime rather than the mix but that is probably just because I am a purist like that!