fire and ice

well my plans for making my white chocolate panna cotta were seriously foiled at the weekend by the fact that my ramekins have disappeared in to thin air, so that one is on the back burner til they turn up.

i've been making the chilli and pink peppercorn bar all week and i obviously hadn't quite got it off my mind during the weekend as i couldn't shake the idea of combining it with the fabulous murphy's vanilla icecream when we were up in killarney on sunday.

murphy's icecream is made in county kerry, just accross the water in dingle. they say on a clear day you can see dingle peninsula from the iveragh peninsula; considering the thick fog that refuses to shift this summer i can't quite remember. what i can remember though is that the flavour of murphy's icecream is unsurpassed mainly due to the murphy brothers untiring quest for the finest ingredients and artisan techniques.

my idea was to combine their vanilla icecream with our chilli and pink peppercorn bar. my idea was that you would get the cold sensation of the icecream in combination with the heat from the chocolate.

now i know that the heat from the chilli isn't really released until you get the chocolate melting so my idea was to grate the chocolate over the icecream (yes, i really had been deliberating this long enough to remember to take my nutmeg grater shopping with me...)therefore making the pieces of chocolate small enough to melt almost instantaneously.

the result.... not so good! the amount of chocolate you got in each spoonful was not enough to provide enough heat to counteract the numb coldness from the icecream, but when i added more the icy particles of chocolate just create a vaguely unpleasant grittiness, a real shame to spoil the smooth and creamy texture of the icecream.

I WAS NOT DETERRED!!

my second option, far simpler, far more effective and you can even leave your kitchen utensils at home!
I used a strip of the chocolate like a spoon. each time i scooped the icecream i bit a bit of the bar! the cold and the heat don't come quite simultaneously but there is an incredibly intriguing shift from cold to hot as you eat your mouthful. the cooling effect of the icecream gradually gives way, as you chew through the chocolate, to the subtley increasing heat of the spices.

last year i was doing some experiments with chocolate shaped spoons, the difficulty in packaging their delicate shapes put me off for a while but this has reinspired me to go back to the drawing board.