Red Dragonfruit Ice Cream

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I have been obsessing about Maya's Red Dragonfruit ice-cream for a few days now...  It's not just the colour - but what an incredible colour it is - it's the ice-cream recipe itself.  We used to make ice-cream a lot in the UK, but ironically now we live in the tropics, we've hardly made it at all here in Brunei.  We have our ice-cream maker here, but just couldn't manage to recreate the recipe without 'proper' British double cream.  We've tried a few variations - using condensed milk (OK if you like condensed-milk-flavour ice-cream), making a custard base (OK, but took an age to make and resulted in rock-solid ice-cream), using tinned cream (yuk!) and thickening milk with cornstarch (foul).  So we'd just about given up.

So when I read Maya's recipe that used mascarpone and coconut cream, I decided this was a combination that just had to be attempted.

And I am SO glad that I did!  Mascarpone is relatively easy to find here, and coconut cream?  Well, we always have coconut milk in the larder, as well as sachets of coconut cream powder, so that was a simple ingredient.  I see that Maya has used this same base with other ice-cream flavours - must try the black sesame some time - so I too will experiment further with it.

 Red dragonfruit is in season right now so is cheap and plentiful.  Visually this dragonfruit is definitely an extrovert with its showy skin and vibrant hot-pink flesh, but its taste is definitely more introverted - quiet and subtle. 

 Although its flavour definitely comes through in this ice-cream, it needed the coconut taste to complement it, and I followed Maya's suggestion of adding some basil leaves to give it an extra lift.  We had some growing so it was a simple (and very tasty) addition.

It was so simple, and so satisfying to make.  I followed Maya's recipe to the letter and it was perfect.  It took mere minutes to transform this:

into this: 

I have yet to attempt making mochi in which to wrap this ice-cream.  Hey, before I read Maya's post I had never even heard of mochi!  It looks exciting and I'd like to try it.  But for now I'm enjoying this ice-cream as it is.  Beautiful and delicious!