Spring Apron Winners and Easy Peasy Lemon Ice Cream

Thank you so very much to all of you who responded so kindly and enthusiastically to my little Spring Apron give-away post. I loved reading all your comments and am so happy to be sending these aprons to happy homes and hope they will be Useful as well as cheery and Spring-like in your kitchens.

It was such fun to read what people thought the aprons might accompany. Mine has already been pressed into service, (as you can see), to accompany making my simnel cake. Needs to be made ahead of Easter, as I like to doctor it with a shot or two of Cointreau over the next few weeks, before it gets its  hat of home-made marzipan. I have a thing about home-made marzipan. Although it's a bit of a hassle to make, I always feel that commercially produced blocks of marzipan taste more of play-doh than almonds if you know what I mean! Not that I make a habit of tasting play-doh!

You will see from the photos why I make my aprons this shape and size - I get dangerously up close and personal with my cake mixture. I have my pride though and felt I really couldn't have pics of flowery aprons enhanced by cake mixture streaks. The photographer was told to "be quick or else"!!

Anyway I have managed to do battle with the random number generator website and asked it nicely to come up with a list of winners. The winners are (in the order they came up) :

Ellie of feltabulous
Milly
Helen of belmont yarns
Lucy of Attic24
Angela of collected yarns

Using the email address under the Contact Me tab at the top of this page, please can you email me your full postal addresses and I will send your aprons out pronto? They are all wrapped up and ready to go as you can see in the pic at the top. Hopefully to get to you in time for some Easter baking / crafting! And just because it's Easter, there is a little surprise pressie in the pocket of each one.

Thank you again for all your lovely comments and for wanting to participate in this little Spring foray.

And whether or not you won one of my Spring aprons, here is my recipe for Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezy Ice Cream. It sings of Spring, is easy as pie, (a lot easier than any pie actually) and I hope may be a nice addition to your Spring recipe repertoire.

The good news is that this ice cream doesn't need to go in an ice cream churner or even need to be stirred by hand, at intervals, during the freezing process. You don't need any special equipment other than a whisk - either an electric or a hand operated one. If you've never made ice cream before, then, although I say it myself, this is a great place to start.

You Will Need An Apron however - it's inclined to be a bit spattery when you get whisking!

What you need (as well as an apron and a whisk!):






























2 large beautiful lemons like the ones in the pic
6 oz  / 175 g icing sugar
500 ml full fat natural yoghurt - I use home made because that's what I have to hand usually but any plain full fat yoghurt will be fine
250 g tub of mascarpone
3 generous dsps of runny honey - the flavour of the honey comes through in the finished ice so while not going overboard, choose a good quality honey distinguished by its flower source, not an anonymous blended one. Pending my bees producing some honey from the garden, (fingers crossed, they look all set to do so, for the first time, this year), I use Waitrose's Orange Blossom honey.

What you do:

Squeeze the juice from the lemons and put in a large bowl. Add the icing sugar, yoghurt, mascarpone and honey.

Whisk everything thoroughly together.

Pour the mixture onto a scrupulously clean plastic box - everything needs to be scrupulously clean with ice cream making - cover, label and freeze.

That's it! Unbelievably easy isn't it? You may just need to wipe a few splatters off the surroundings though!!

It will need a good few hours in the freezer to freeze firm enough to scoop and serve and once it's really frozen solid you will need to take it out a good half an hour before serving to "ripen" ie become soft enough to scoop. There's nothing worse than trying to scoop out ice cream that's frozen like granite and might respond to a hammer and chisel or a pick axe but laughs scornfully in the face of your average ice cream scoop, feebly scraping away at the unyielding surface!

The texture of this ice cream is not as 100% perfect as a custard-based, churned one, if one is going to be perfectionist about it, but it's pretty good nonetheless (I think, anyway) and better than it has any business to be considering how easy it is!!!

It's delicious on its own or with a few raspberries, strawberries, blueberries or blackberries.