Last month’s Olive magazine syndicated a Telegraph article with a chocolate icecream recipe.

It’s basically frozen blancmange.

Whilst that might not sound appetizing at all, the chocolate icecream is pretty awesome. I found it ever so slightly grainy but my companion ((as they say in restaurant reviews)) didn’t. It is very chocolaty and tastes every bit as good as the Co-op’s “indulgent” Belgian chocolate icecream. Whilst the recipe might call for “high quality cocoa”, Bourneville did me just fine.

Three further points to make about it all:

a) it can be made with all the stuff I just have in the house. Cornflour, cocoa powder and sugar are all things that live in the cupboard. And then a little story about the milk: we now have a milkman, through MilkAndMore.co.uk who is broadly excellent and whom I would have no hesitation recommending. However going back to milk deliveries – and only every other day at that – has occasionally meant running out of milk. So I have got in the habit of having a handful of cartons of UHT milk in the back of the cupboard for emergencies. I actually don’t like UHT – it tastes funny to me. (My mother thinks that it’s the cream that tastes weird and that skimmed UHT milk is OK. I don’t agree) However, UHT milk is better than no milk at all in tea. But the other time to use UHT is if you are boiling it. So it makes no difference to use UHT in sauces, yoghurt, cocoa etc, and it is fine to use it in this recipe, making it a truly storecupboard recipe, for me at least.

b) it looks instantly variable and augmentable for other versions of the icecream. That Sicilian orange flavouring that Dan Lepard made me buy would zhuzh it up into Choc Orange; similarly a splodge of peppermint flavouring sends it to Choc Mint. Add cocoa nibs or coffee beans or chopped nuts for some crunch or marshmallows to make it into rocky road. Addition of a big spoon of espresso powder could switch it to mocha. Moving beyond chocolate, I wonder if you could get away with making this in other flavours entirely? You could use the instant coffee instead of the cocoa rather than in addition to, for a mocha, adding coffee beans again for crunch and even a spoon of ground coffee for mouth feel. As with the blancmange, you could infuse the simmering milk with any number of whole spices: vanilla beans, cardamom pods, cloves, cinnamon sticks, lemon peel… in combination or alone for a clear pure taste. How about a version with the oh-so-trendy, ouch-my-bank-balance matcha powder for green tea icecream? And so on!

c) it looked to me as if you could easily double the quantities and still have it fit neatly in our icecream maker.

d) serves 10? does it buggery. We rationed ourselves to a single scoop eaten slowly, rather than troughling our way through the whole pot at once. I think you could get 6 scoops tops out of that barely-a-pint recipe.