My very first job ever was working at an ice cream shop. It was called Strawberry Patch, it was in Claremont (before it became a Quarter) and it was the BEST JOB EVER. I got to work that soft serve machine and made choc coated cones ( the trick is to fill in the whole cone- not just the top bit, otherwise it will fall off). In those days your ice cream selection was limited to chocolate, strawberry, vanilla and a mix of the three.
Ice cream is one of those things that I don't eat a lot, but when I do I really, really love it. My love affair with ice cream goes back to my childhood when my cousins and I would walk to the shop down the road from my Grandparents and buy a block of ice cream that was packaged in cardboard. It tasted like cardboard and it was AWESOME. I was also very fond on the ice cream cakes, but the real original ones where the ice cream roses where made from real cream. They tasted the best. Then there was the Sunday afternoons when the Mr Whippy van would come around to finish off the weekend with a soft serve cone.
Ice cream has obviously come a long way from the days of the old strawberry wave (that was always on offer at my other Grandparents house because it was my Aunts favourite- I was always more of a Neapolitan girl myself- although my brother was partial to Trio which was orange, green and white).
My first real exposure to amazing ice cream was in Italy. As chance would have it I was pregnant and craving ice cream like,well, a pregnant woman. It was amazing, and perhaps the best thing is that Italians considered it healthy because it had fruit and milk in it. I really like their thinking.
I had never had ice cream like it until I had ice cream from il gelato. I had forgotten how much I loved their ice cream until this week when my friends daughter got a job with them. Oh My Feakin God that stuff is good, and it is nearly healthy. 50% lower in fat than normal ice cream and their sorbets are 90% fat free.(My friend Tracy makes an amazing drink where you mix sorbet with a bottle of champagne. Needles to say that is also amazing). They also do this really cool little Semi Freddo's (that semi frozen to you and me) in flavours like Ferro, chocolate and Pistachio which I sometimes serve as dessert when I can't be bothered making anything. I heard once on some cooking show that you can judge a companies ice cream by their Pistachio ice cream.
So you can imagine my excitement when I was told that il gelato are making Christmas ice cream cakes. Yep a Christmas Ice Cream cake. Is there anything more Australian than that? A layer of Ferrero, Nougat and Bacio ice cream. How can that get any better? Well how about if I told you that the first 20 cakes ordered get $10 off!! You can go here if you would like to order one or just check out their web site.
All this talk of ice cream is making me hungry. I'm going to send my husband off to our local IGA to grab me some.
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