Coconut, cardamom and banana ice-cream in the clouds

Once upon a time, some Triple Motion crankers had a crazy idea…the conversation went something like this:

Jen:      “Hey Dave I’m coming to the UK, lets make some ice-cream”

Big D:    “Sounds good. What did you have in mind?”

Jen:      “How about cranking on top of a mountain in the Lake district?”

Big D:   “It rains an awful lot in the Lakes you know.”

Jen:      “When has a bit of rain ever stood in the way of a Triple Motion ice-cream adventure?”

Big D:    “Ok, lets do it.”

What I didn’t realise was that Dave had decided we should make icecream up Scafell Pike (the biggests mountain in England). Fortunately Peter jumped at the chance to advance the ice-cream cause so we had a good team for the challenge.

We met up the night before at a fancy restaurant on Ullswater for a slap up meal and some wine (1988 Ch. Ausone – drinking very well at the moment) . Unfortunately the festivities rather dragged into the wee-small-hours and we were all a bit tired and late out of bed the next morning.

However, undeterred we headed out to the supermarket to get supplies. As it was Halloween, we had planned to have pumpkin ice-cream, but lack of decent specimens and lack of time to roast down the flesh necessitated some hurried mid-supermarket-aisle negotiation afterwhich we settled on coconut and cardamom (which later got a banana thrown in for luck).

Back at the Dave-cave the mix was prepared as follows:

• 6 cardamom pods finely ground
• 1 mashed banana
• 1 tin cup coconut milk
• 1 egg
• 1 US cup cream
• Milk top up

It was then off to Borrowdale to gear up and climb that thar hill…

As we got nearer the summit it became pretty apparent that we were going to run out of daylight to get up and down safely. So we settled for a small spur about a kilometre from the summit which offered a superb view of the cloud in which we were sitting.

Cranking duly commenced and although the flavour was not Halloween themed, the crankers were…

In a slightly masochistic way, it was great fun being up there in the clouds cranking. We were hoping we could tempt some hikers with our icy-fair but although we had seen plenty of other folk around earlier on in the day, when the time came to eat there we were momentarily alone and thus left with nearly 2 litres of ice-cream to finish off between the three of us.

Taste-wise final result was pretty good although we were so dam cold by the time we were eating the nuances of flavour and texture have slipped from my memory. On balance, I am not sure the banana added much and if I were to make it again I would probably omit it and chuck in a few more cardamom pods to beef up the flavour a little.