First time lucky

Ice cream in Scotland seems like an oxymoron. When I'm at home in Edinburgh, I don't tend to eat much of the stuff - tubs of the good varieties are too expensive to justify pigging out on (we never have got around to abusing the '3 films and a tub of Ben & Jerry's for £10 which our video rental shop advertises in the window). Eating ice cream out though, is another matter. On the beach, I really can never resist a 99 flake; in a restaurant, I'll always enquire in the hope of fancy flavours. Finally able to combine being in Scotland and eating ice cream out, I relished the opportunity to do some research for the List magazine's Fife Larder publication, on this much loved dairy dessert's interesting identity in the country. With the Italians who arrived in the 1900s, came recipes for gelato, and thank goodness - it's stuck for generations, and seems to also have inspired Scottish dairies to make something better than soft scoop.

The article's yet to be published, but this is all to illustrate how much ice cream has of late been on my mind, and therefore how apt it was for me to receive an ice-cream maker from a very lovely person for my recent birthday. From now, rather than even think about buying any, I'll simply look to my freezer where tubs of home-made goodness will await me...well. This has not quite been the case, but summer's on the way and I'm about to move house, so there's a resolution somewhere. I've made ice cream a number of times before, using a twenty year-old, table-sized machine that after all that time, churns out good results, but somehow it felt new and exciting using my own, perfectly sized gadget.

I had thought to begin this culinary chapter with a classic - vanilla, or chocolate perhaps - but I was cooking in honour of a special dinner, so something more extravagant seemed necessary. Since it's so fashionable these days, and I'd read recommendations of a particularly good recipe from David Lebovitz, I decided on salted caramel. I suspect due to the peaceful kitchen, I was for the first time successful in making caramel - no seizing or any lumps in sight. Lebovitz has some nice pictures of the process on his website (I'm not yet practiced enough with boiling sugar to always have a camera in one hand). It set a pretty high precedent for future creations of my GelatoChef, and provided the perfect end to a momentous meal (see above) at the start of the summer.