Chocolate pancakes with Rhubarb compote & Vanilla Ice cream

Pancake day this month and a girl just loves chocolate and with rhubarb still in season this makes a great combination.  I cant believe how fast my little girl is growing she seems such a big girl at 4 and half and it does not help seeing her up against Ella, she is just shooting up in front of my eyes and is so good in the kitchen now, so over to Sophie as she makes her lunch.

Ingredients
2 eggs
250g ricotta
125ml milk
100g flour
30g cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
zest and juice of an orange
400g rhubarb
80g golden caster sugar

• mix the egg yolks,ricotta, milk, flour, cocoa, orange zest and baking powder
• whisk the egg white till they form peaks
• fold the egg yolk mixture into the egg whites
• cut the rhubarb in to small chunks and cook with the sugar and orange juice on a gentle simmer for 10 mins
• to cook the pancakes use a hot pan with a little oil and plop a big spoonfull onto the pan and spread out into a circle shape and allow to cook on one side before flipping over 

Serve pancakes with a nice big spoon of rhubarb and how about a big dollop vanilla ice cream you can find a recipe for home made ice cream at the bottom of this post

You can find a recipe for home made ice cream here

Very Vanilla

Ice Cream Ice Cream we all love Ice Cream !!! Well everyone in our family does,  i have been saving for months and months for a fancy dan ice cream machine, making sure that for birthdays and Christmas i got vouchers too as a way to help out on the funding of the purchase and now making ice cream by hand and having to wait overnight for it to be frozen is now over as i can now whip up a batch in 30 mins WOOT WOOT hands in the air.

So to kick off this new gadget i went back to basics and made a vanilla ice cream, i will probably make this recipe a number of times trying out different cream and milk types like Cornish cream, maybe goats milk, im even tempted to use ricotta cheese and creme fraiche just to see how they influence the flavours.

For now i made this straight forward as you need a start point although i did use golden caster sugar and a lot of vanilla seeds from 2 pods making it very vanillary.

RECIPE
250ml full fat milk always full fat as you need the milk fat to give a great texture.
125ml double cream
2 vanilla pods
2 egg yolks
pinch of salt

This is a very basic recipe that can be found anywhere and is the traditional custard based type.

1 heat milk and cream till steaming
2 whisk yolks and sugar till fluffy
3 add warmed milk and mix and then heat again i did mine in the microwave checking every 30 secs to a min till it coated the back of a spoon.  You can also do this in a pan make sure you stir all the time though as you may get lumps, if you get lumps just sieve.
4 cool the mix then add to your machine or you can do this by hand by placing in the freezer and beat every hour with a hand whisk to break up the crystals, you may need to beat this 4 or 5 times then when this firms up leave over night in the freezer