Dairy Free Malted Milk Ice Cream

The sun made an appearance earlier this week and for a brief fleeting moment it felt like summer had arrived and so I dug out my sandals and started eating copious amounts of ice cream (not that I really need the sun to shine to start tucking into ice cream!). The sun has now done a runner and the sandal wearing has been put on hold...the ice cream eating however continues! And after finishing off my beyond delicious Easter egg chocolate sorbet I needed to stock the freezer back up with something as equally yummy. Luckily at this moment I spotted that Kavey over at Kavey Eats has another round of Bloggers Scream for Ice Cream on the go. This month the theme is Hot Drink inspired frozen treats. Now it just also happens that last week while having a mega Master Chef catch up session I had seen a dish containing a rather delectable looking malted milk ice cream. And although I have never been a massive Horlicks drinker I am a bit of a fan of a malted milk (a.k.a moo cow) biscuit.

And so I set out to make a dairy free malted milk ice cream of my very own. Now this isn't as easy as it may sound as you can't simply mix some Horlicks powder with a dairy free milk alternative as the drinks powder contains dairy. So I had to get a little more creative and used malt extract along with a little cocoa powder to make this ice cream resulting in more of an Ovaltine-inspired concoction. I have to say I was rather pleased with the comfortingly malty end result....and now I have a great excuse to eat ice cream just before bedtime!!!

INGREDIENTS

500 ml almond milk
4 tablespoons malt extract
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
75 g caster sugar
4 egg yolks
1 tablespoon of corn flour

Place the almond milk, malt extract and cocoa powder into a saucepan, place over a medium heat and gradually bring the mixture up to the boil.

In the meantime mix together the sugar, egg yolks and corn flour in a heat proof jug.

Once the milk mixture has begun to bubble remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly. Then pour about a quarter of the mixture into the jug with the egg mixture beating thoroughly until a smooth mixture is formed. Then pour the egg mixture back into the saucepan, place over a medium heat and continue to whisk until the mixture begins to thicken, then remove from the heat.

Pour the ice cream into a freezer proof container, cover the surface with cling film to prevent a skin from forming and allow the mixture to cool to room temperature.

Once cooled down transfer the mixture to an ice cream maker...or if like me you don't own such fancy kitchen equipment transfer the container to the freezer. Remove the ice cream from the freezer every couple of hours and blitz with a hand blender to break down any ice crystals that might form and you end up with a scoopable end product. Repeat this three or four times and then leave in the freezer until you require a pre-bedtime ice cream treat.