Purbeck ice-cream, Dorset

Berries with clotted cream and honeycomb hash, and kites!

We recently spent four days in Dorset near Lyme Regis. I didn’t know the county well and now I know that it will be a place to revisit again and again. It is stunning. The varied coast line with red pebbled beaches, bright chalk white cliffs, turquoise and green water and fossils is beautiful. Away from the coast are pretty little villages with thatched roofed cottages and undulating hills broken up with hedgerows delineating the fields. Everywhere we looked there was something to make us pause to take it in. We walked up Golden Cap, visited Lulworth Cove and Studland and went to a kite festival on Eggardon Hill. This was where we made one of the best foodie discoveries of our trip: Purbeck ice-cream.  I have lived in Italy twice and love Italian gelato but I think, yes, I really do think that Purbeck ice-cream might be better! This may cause some wild hand gestures and tuts from Italian friends. The flavours were typically British: berries with clotted cream, honeycomb hash, stem ginger and more. The salted caramel actually had little crunchy bits of hard caramel in it, it was so good! One of my favourite flavours of gelato is pistachio and there wasn’t a pistachio to make a true comparison with Italian ice-cream to but, seriously, this creamy goodness was amazing!

You can find more information and even an app with an ice-cream locator here

We stayed in the beautiful village of Whitchurch Canonicorum in a gorgeous little thatched cottage with alpacas in the field behind it. Find it here.

Monkeys, bananas and kites

One of the views from Golden Cap

Lulworth Cove

 

Vioko Gelat, Barcelona

I just returned from Barcelona where I had scrumptious seafood and seriously good ice cream from Vioko in Barceloneta. It’s an Argentinian ice cream and chocolate company. It also makes macarons – not as good as Pierre Herme or La Duree but with interesting flavours such as lime with olive oil. The shop is beautifully designed with huge black and white photographs of what looks like Alpine scenery on the walls. The logo is a deer so I got a feeling of the Alps or Scandinavia but no, the mountains are Argentinian. There must be some pretty good ice cream recipes knocking about in Argentina with the huge Italian community and this place certainly had great flavours. I had dulce de leche (anything to do with caramel is always at the top of my list) and grapefruit with lavender. The attention to detail in the design is ace with the flavours displayed on the wall with back lit coloured patterned glass discs representing the flavours next to the names. I really recommend it and will certainly return when I am next lucky enough to be in the fabulous BCN.

Cheat’s Brownie Sundae

I went to a friend’s flat for a pot luck supper the other night and was taking brownies but with my to and fro-ing about London they got shaken around in the tupperware. Uh-oh, the brownies were now chocolate crumblies so I decided to get Cornish clotted cream ice-cream and chocolate sauce, heap it all into a big bowl and make a giant brownie sundae.  So easy and so satisfying. It went down a treat. The sauce I used was chocolate creme patissiere that I found in Sainsbury’s which was very good. No need to make the ice-cream and chocolate sauce although that would be really impressive. That reminds me, I had an amazing home-made chocolate sauce at a friend’s recently – next post chocolate sauce!