Blackberry ice cream

I make this every year at the cottage. The girls helped today, dyeing themselves purple in the process. Iris’s hands are still stained three hours later despite scrubbing. The quantities below make two 1200ml tubs (the size of the white ones with coloured lids at the cottage). The ice cream machine can only do one at a time so you need to do one batch, then wash, dry and return the machine to the freezer overnight, then do the second batch the next morning (or obviously halve the quantities).

800g blackberries
200ml cold water
400g caster sugar
Juice of 4 lemons
6 tablespoons creme de mures or kirsch
600ml (1 pint) double cream, whipped to ribbons – but do this in two batches when you’re ready to churn the ice cream

Puree the blackberries with the water in the magimix for about a minute. Sieve this into a large bowl (the big plastic jigs at the cottage are best), pushing it all through until only the pippy mush is left in the sieve. Add the sugar, lemon juice and creme de mures to the pulpy juice in the large bowl. Divide this mixture into two (around 750/800ml each) and put one of these into the fridge until you can make the second batch. Fold in 300ml of the whipped cream, pour into the ice cream maker and churn the mixture for about 15 minutes until it’s half-frozen. Scrape this into a container and freeze immediately. Do the second batch in the same way.

The recipe for this (from Michel Roux in an old Master Chef cook book) is originally for raspberry ice cream. I did that once too and it was also good, but not as unusual as the blackberry one and there are so many at the cottage in August it seems like a good way of using them.