Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

Yesterday, it was Gingerbread; and today it’s Champagne-Vanilla Ice Cream, as ‘Blow the Bank’ returns a touch of class to the 4^th of July.

Sometime toward the end of last year, the great and always entertaining Rowena of Rubber Slippers in Italy and I were discussing the pleasures of foods and wines, when Rowena suggested wine ice cream. It had never occurred to me to add wine to ice cream, even though I had tried all sorts of other concoctions, from the very good addition of balsamic vinegar to the very bad addition of Tabasco sauce.

Why Tabasco sauce? Well, I love it — almost as much as I love ice cream. I’ve even been to the McIlhenny family’s Avery Island in Louisiana where it’s manufactured (with InterWined’s Jacob Gaffney, in fact). Seen the Buddha; seen the alligators; bought a t-shirt that was ruined when the city of New Orleans and my ground-floor apartment were flooded in the summer of 1994. So, why shouldn’t I add between 20 and 30 drops of Tabasco to my ice cream? Because the fiery flavour of each drop intensifies as it cuts straight through the ice cream like a blade through butter, that’s why.

Frankly, I blame all of it on those Tabasco adverts that ran on American television in the early 1990s with the likes of Dan Ackroyd daring you try Tabasco sauce with all of your favourite foods. “So what do you put it on?” Not ICE CREAM! Not ice cream…

So what about wine and ice cream? After all, alcohol and ice cream really isn’t anything new. There are many ice cream cocktails and several alcohol ice creams. But wine ice creams? Admittedly even though I was wary of a Tabasco-like fiasco, I was intrigued and found myself agreeing to make wine ice cream as soon as I purchased an ice cream maker.

Well, I bought an ice cream maker last week. And true to my word, one of the very first ice creams I made was Champagne-Vanilla with a bottle of Bricout Premier Cru Cuvee Prestige Brut, £13.30 per bottle from Tesco (available online by the case).

Unlike with the ice cream Tabasco sauce, this was a perfect match. The champagne works to enhance and sharpen the flavour of the ice cream, while the vanilla keeps the balance and helps prevent the champagne from becoming too strong or overbearing.
InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

Champagne-Vanilla Ice Cream

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Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week as part of a two-day 4^th of July spectacular, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you a bucket of Mostly-Organic Gingerbread Ice Cream.

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream”. Sure, it’s a cliché; but one look in my freezer will prove that at least the first part’s true. Regardless of the weather or season, when it comes to my culinary affections, ice cream always reigns supreme and leaves me wanting more.

Need proof: on a recent trip to visit my sister in Rome, what was top of my list of things to do? See the Trevi Fountain? Tour the Vatican? Nope; it was find a gelateria. And, yes, I did see the Trevi Fountain and tour the Vatican, lest you think I’m some sort of cultural heathen. It’s just that I did both with a cono of gelato in my hand. (In fact, the best gelato in Rome comes from a gelateria very close the Vatican. Seek it out.)

From Japanese Yukimi Daifuku on the streets of London to a single scoop of vanilla pressed into the top of sugar cone and served my grandmother’s kitchen in a scene ripped for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, I love ice cream. I’ll scream it loud and scream it proud.

The Web is awash with quick and easy recipes for gingerbread ice cream. The problem is most involve simply adding a bit of gingerbread crumbs to some bog-standard brand of ready-made vanilla in a loose and free-wheeling interpretation of the word ‘recipe’ not even worthy of the back of a packet of Hamburger Helper and a Campbell’s Soup tin or whatever other cultural reference implies adding one ready-made food to another and calling it a quick and easy recipe for anything in the name of ‘fast food’. If you really want beef stroganoff and don’t have the time to prepare it, buy it ready made and order it from a restaurant. If that sounds somewhat unforgiving, it’s meant to do.

InterWined is all for quick and easy recipes — few of us have the time for anything else — when quick and easy means simple and straight-forward to prepare. Not fast for the sake of speed. Recipes shouldn’t be fast at the expense of quality or flavour. Without those, there’s little point in following a quick and easy recipe much less eating quick and easy food, outside of staying alive. And I, for one, have never been terribly keen on things that double as songs titles for the Bee Gees. Don’t even get me started on that joke that started the whole world crying. Seriously, how bad did that joke have to be? Can you even call it a joke if all it does it make people cry?

Not-entirely InterWined’s Own Recipe for Mostly-Organic Gingerbread Ice Cream is definitely no joke. Based on a recipe for gingerbread ice cream from KitchenAid, it might not be as fast as some on the Web, but it is certainly quick and easy to prepare without sacrificing flavour or quality. This is premium ice cream made with organic milk and free-range eggs and infused with freshly-baked gingerbread cookies from the start to ensure that the ice cream, not only took on the colour of the cookies, but evenly absorbed the full, rich flavour of the gingerbread. One bite of this and you’ll never do quick and easy ice cream for the sake of quick and easy again.

Not-entirely InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full*

Gingerbread Ice Cream

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