Murphy's Banana Ice-Cream with Chocolate Shavings

Now I am sure I didn't need any more dessert this weekend after the baked chocolate tart but I promised the husbag that I'd make him banana ice-cream with chocolate chips and being the perfect wife that I am I couldn't let him down!!! ;-) tee hee and a girl can never have too much chocoalte either!!

So last week Kieran posted the most gorgeous sounding banana ice-cream with chocolate shavings recipe and I just had to try it. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with bananas, sometimes I can't get enough of them and sometimes I won't touch them. I think it's all the little stringy bits to be honest and I prefer them slightly under ripe as the flavour is different to a really ripe one.

So anyway enough rambling about my relationship with bananas here's the recipe, I have changed the order of the ingredients to reflect the order I used them in and the original is available in the link above.

• 2 large bananas (the original recipe called for 3 but mine we MAHOOSIVE so I used 2)
  
• 15 ml (1 tablespoon) fresh lemon juice
  
• 130g sugar
• 5 egg yolks
• 200 ml milk
• 240 ml cream
• 20 g good quality dark chocolate (I probably used a bit more as I threw in some extra chips once I had the first 20g in)

Combine the bananas with the lemon juice and blend or mash until smooth, I used a blender to make the bananas as smooth as possible cos the idea of lumps just doesn't do it for me but you might like your bananas a little lumpier.

Put the bananas in a small saucepan, add two tablespoons of sugar and cook over low heat, stirring all the time. Don’t over-cook them as once they're warm they should release a strong banana smell so you'll know then that's enough!

Beat the rest of the sugar and egg yolks together until thick and pale yellow.

Bring the milk to a low simmer in a small saucepan and then beat the milk into the eggs and sugar in a slow stream.

Put the mixture back into the saucepan and place over low heat. Stir continuously until the custard thickens slightly (around 65-70C) and coats the back of a spoon. Don’t over-heat the mixture because at around 76C you will scramble the eggs! I never use a thermometer for this part but if you have one then I'd say to use it cos it'll be much easier.

Mix in the bananas and transfer the custard into a small container, cover and put into the fridge until cool

Whip the cream until it forms soft peaks - don’t over-whip and fold the cream into the custard.

I have an ice-cream maker and very rarely use it as I'm just too lazy to put the bowl in the freezer overnight I guess. It's just as easy to stir every hour or so I find. But if you're using an ice-cream machine then put it in for about 15 mins and then put it in the freezer until it's solid

I used chocolate chips as I had some left over from christmas and mixed them in after 4 hours in the freezer.

This was the first ice-cream I've made with milk in it and it was lovely and light. Am definitely a fan of fresh banana ice-cream and will make this again.

Comfort food - Banana Bread

Last Friday week in a certain large supermaket who shall remain nameless I bought 2 bags of bananas that were reduced as they had reached their "sell by" date thinking it was a fantastic idea obviously.

Needless to say they were never used so I made up my mind to do something with them and banana bread is something I've never made before.

I used a recipe from 80breakfasts as it's a blog I read all the time and remembered I'd seen this recipe ages ago and thought I must make that at some stage. I've measured everything to make it easier as opposed to using cup measurements but you can find the original recipe here should you want to use the original measurements.

• 3 or 4 ripe bananas (mine were very ripe but not black and I used 3 medium bananas cos I was a bit worried it'd be too banana-y)
• 2oz melted butter
• 200g sugar (I used raw cane caster sugar as opposed to white)
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract (not essence)
• 1 tsp baking soda
• pinch salt
• 300g flour

I am lazy and played around with the instructions so here's what I did but if you want to follow the original recipe click on the link above.

• Put your bananas (I used 3) into a food processor and blend
• Add your melted butter, vanilla extract, egg and salt and blend for a couple of seconds
• Add the sugar and blend and then the flour.

The mixture is quite stiff but still very easy to work with, I made 2 loaves 1 in a silicone mould and 1 in a loaf tin. Both came out really well and the loaf in the pics is from the silicone and so it's lower but still gorgeous.

Enjoy!!!!