That Time I Invented My Perfect Summer Food

A couple of years ago, I moved back to my home...hamlet* and ran out of things to do in about five minutes. It was grim, and then COVID hit, and we didn't even have buses anymore. (We didn't actually have COVID for ages, either. On account of there being basically no people.)

Like any rational woman, I turned to sugar, and blogging, and blogging about sugar. I re-discovered my favourite tooth-decaying nibbles from childhood, and wrote a whole series about them: a must-see guide for visitors to Scotland that beats out any list of castles. Whatever deficits may be present in our savoury cuisine, we more than make up for them in chocolate, coconut and jam (and tablet, and shortbread, and...just read it).

I didn't realise anything was missing from this pre-diabetic cornucopia until I had an uncontrollable craving for Ben and Jerry's one night and ordered it from a takeaway. While digging into the Global Ultimate Ice Cream, Phish Food (don't argue), the obvious question hit me - why didn't Scotland have anything like this?!

It's not like we don't have ice cream. We do. We have grown-up traditional ice cream like your grandma used to eat.

What we don't have is bitty, gooey, satisfying, movie-night ice cream (we don't have movies, either, really, but that's by-the-by). Or rather, we didn't...until yours truly invented the Ultimate Scottish Ice Cream!

I had no idea just how dangerous and thrilling the ice-cream development process would be. I was spoilt for choice for which sugary treats to throw in, but some of them did not survive the freezing process; others survived rather too well, such as the chunks of Mackies chocolate I nearly broke my teeth on or the coconut that sliced up my throat.

Ratios had to be perfectly calculated, too: it's all very well using Scottish Heather Honey instead of sugar, but it turns out that replacing like for like is waaaaay too much of a good thing. Honey is powerful stuff, and the chocolate can hardly complete.

I was determined to make the ingredients as Scottish as possible, and the fourth and final version I'll present below has just one ingredient that definitely isn't Scottish: golden caster sugar. Don't worry, though: I realise that only a tiny portion of the internet lives in Scotland, so I also came up with a whole list of substitutions for the rest of you!

Substitutions for Taste/Dietary Requirements

Firstly, if you don’t like honey, you can replace it with the same weight of sugar, or a little more if you don’t want to risk insufficient glucose. The other way around – replacing the sugar with honey – is overpowering, and I don’t recommend it. That said – it’s your life, do what you want.

If you want to, you can make your own coulis quite simply. I did this for my first two versions, and then simply became too lazy. Also, the problem with making your own is that the quantity is a little unpredictable.

If you want to go gluten-free, you will need to replace the Tunnock’s Tea Cakes with Lee’s Snowballs, not Tunnock’s snowballs, as the latter are not gluten-free. Tunnocks also have too much throat-tickling coconut, in my opinion. If you haven't got access to either, try making just the marshmallow part of this recipe.

The recipe is vegetarian, but it’s totally loaded with eggs so I can’t imagine any way of making it vegan. Good luck to you if you want to give it a go! (And do let me know how it goes.)

Substitutions for Unavailable Scottish Snacks

Graham’s Scottish Double Cream

Don’t be silly – it’s just cream. Literally the only difference is the saltire on the packaging and an extra 20p or so on the price. Use any double cream you can find. (For the USians, this is heavy cream.)

Tablet

You can order tablet online. If you don’t want to wait, it’s not very difficult to make it yourself.

Tunnock’s Tea Cakes

You can make similar teacakes at home. Personally, I’d recommend that unless you want to try the teacakes in their own right, you just skip straight to step 11 and only do the marshmallow part. That’s what’s essential in this recipe.

If you’re prepared to wait, you can order them online from British Corner Shop.

Heather Honey

You can use any honey, or replace all the honey with sugar, if you really must.

Mackie’s Chocolate

If you’re just in another part of the UK, you can buy it online. Unfortunately, they only do UK mainland delivery (the Scottish islander in me is shaking her fist right now).

Otherwise, just select high-quality, creamy milk chocolate from what you have available.

Ingredients

• three whole eggs
• three egg yolks
• 70g heather honey, or heather honey with whisky (I used Heather Hill Farm’s)
• 100g caster/golden caster sugar
• 600ml Graham’s Scottish double cream
• 1 Mrs Tilly’s tablet bar, or 90-100g any other tablet
• 4 Tunnocks tea cakes
• 120g bar Mackie’s milk chocolate
• 50g ready-made raspberry coulis

Equipment

• baking paper
• a plate
• the two biggest mixing bowls in your kitchen
• electric whisk
• a large container with lid suitable for freezing (at least 2l capacity)

Time

About an hour of actual work; min. 9 hours chilling/freezing time.

Method/Steps

1. Melt the chocolate using whichever method you prefer; I am a big believer in the bowl-over-boiling-water but you do you.
2. Cover a plate with baking paper – no need to grease it. Spread the chocolate thinly over the baking paper.
3. Let it cool for a few minutes, then stick it in the fridge for at least an hour before you start the rest of the recipe.
4. Whisk the eggs, egg yolks, honey and sugar together for a long time. You will be surprised by how long it takes. Go straight past the very bubbly stage and proceed to pale and thick, but probably still a bit bubbly.
5. In the other bowl, whip the cream until the legendary soft peaks stage. It doesn’t matter if it gets a tiny bit too stiff; too runny is definitely bad, though.
6. Fold them together. The cream might seem to form little clumps for a while; not a problem. Keep stirring and all will be well.
7. Chop the tablet into little squares, roughly. It will crumble whatever way it wants.
8. The tea cakes will not really want to be chopped and try to stick together in lumps. Just do your best: this is not Science, it is Art.
9. Take the chocolate out of the fridge and break it into pieces of whatever size you feel like.
10. Throw all of these components in and mix thoroughly.
11. Pour all the mixture into the freezeable container.
12. Either pour the raspberry coulis in random lines now and go straight to freezing for at least 8 hours, or freeze for 1 hour, give it another good stir and then pour the coulis in. This will ensure a more even spread of ingredients.

You can download a printable recipe card here.

I really hope you love the Ultimate Scottish Ice Cream as much as I do!

This recipe was originally published on my blog.