I've never made this (originally Victorian) recipe which flavours ice-cream with caramelised brown bread before, so looked up various sources to see how to go about it. There seem to be two distinct schools of thought; one in which you do everything you can to combine the two elements together into one beige whole (letting the breadcrumbs soak in the custard, for example); and one in which you go for more of a praline-speckled effect. Since the former sounded frankly dull, and the latter really quite nice, that's the way I've gone.
The custard
(If you absolutely can't face making custard, then I suppose you could buy one of those tubs of posh refrigerated supermarket custard and just skip this bit. Not Bird's, though, or anything along those lines. Bright yellow custard has its place, but this isn't it).
You'll need six egg yolks for this (once again, the egg whites have been bagged up and frozen. I've promised stacks of breadcrumb macaroons to the office no-waste bake sale next week, so this works out quite nicely for me).
Add 100g caster sugar and whisk together.
Pour a pint (or 500ml, if wherever you get your milk from does it in metric measures - it's technically 68ml short of a pint but the world won't end) into a large, heavy bottomed pan.
Add a splish of vanilla... (If I were making plain vanilla ice-cream, I would probably use the seeds from a vanilla pod, just because the little dark speckles look so nice, but they'd be completely lost against the much bigger bits which will be folded through this mixture later on, so it's not worth the bother, here).
...and heat until it's just about to boil. Then pour it onto the egg yolks, whisking like mad the whole time. (Once again I don't have a photo of this stage; it needs too many hands).
Rinse out the pan (there's bound to be some residual milk) and pour the custard mix back into it. Heat gently, stirring the whole time, until it thickens. If you didn't stir constantly, it would start to thicken in the places where it's in contact with the heat (i.e. round the edges and on the bottom of the pan), and when you next mixed it, you'd get lumps. So, keep it moving. It'll probably take five minutes or so.
In the interests of full disclosure I should mention that my custard did start to split. This is not the end of the world, or even much of a problem; just sit the whole pan into cold water (i.e. in the sink) and whisk until it sorts itself out.
See? All fine.
Take the custard off the heat and leave it to cool. (Sitting a sheet of damp baking parchment on the surface will help prevent it from forming a skin). This could be used as the basis for whatever ice-cream you want; or just as custard to go with other things - although if I were making it for that, I'd use less sugar - eating things really cold dulls down tastes, so you need the flavours to be pretty full-on when you're making ice-cream.
The ice-cream
To make the ice-cream, whip about 250ml double cream (or 300ml, if that's how big the tub is; I was just saving a bit back for something else).
Gently combine the custard and the cream. (Normally I would go cream-into-custard, folding, but this particular cream whipped so quickly and stiffly it wouldn't have mixed into the custard smoothly, so I whisked the custard into the cream instead).
If you have an ice-cream maker, then feel free to break it out and let it do its thing at this point. Assuming you don't (and you really don't need one) pour the mixture into a freezable container - make sure there's a bit of room to manoeuvre, as the brown bread praline will be going in later (this is a 1.4l box, if that helps) - and stick it in the freezer.
In exactly the same way as we didn't want to let the custard heat without stirring it, to avoid it having a weird texture, so we don't want the ice-cream to freeze all without mixing it. It would go sort of solid and ice-crystal-y and generally wrong. So, every 45 minutes or so for the first few hours the ice-cream is in the freezer, you need to whip it out and mix it thoroughly. Pay particular attention to the edges of the tub, as this is where it'll start to freeze. Scrape all the frozen bits off the sides off and mix them into the rest.
The brown bread praline
I used four hot-cross buns for this - I think they weighed about 200g.
I wanted to make a relatively chunky praline, so rather than make breadcrumbs I just crumbled the buns by hand into little nubbly pieces.
Most recipes brown the bread under the grill, mixed with sugar, but this needs a lot of watching, and I wanted to make something more genuinely praline-y. So, I spread the bread out on a baking tray and stuck it in a hot oven for 10-15 minutes, stirring it about from time to time. You still have to keep half an eye on it, but you don't have to lurk around with your head shoved under the grill, which is what the other approach calls for. Once they're done, take them out and let them cool.
Put 200g caster sugar into a heavy-based frying pan or wide saucepan, and put it on the heat. You'll notice that it will gradually start to melt around the edges.
Leave it alone as far as possible - try not to stir it unless you absolutely have to - until you have a reddish-brown caramel. (Be really careful with this. Sugar boils at much higher temperatures than water does; if you get any of it on you, it will carry on boiling on your skin. Pay attention, and ban children and pets from the vicinity while you do this bit.)
Pour in the bread pieces, and stir to mix them through the caramel.
Then pour the whole lot onto a lined (don't forget to line it or you'll be chiselling bread praline off it for the next week) baking tray, spread it out, and let it cool. Once it's cooled and solidified, break it up into bits by whatever means you like - some people would put this into a food processor and blitz it to dust, but I want some chunks, so I just broke it apart by hand and whacked any recalcitrant bits with a rolling pin.
Keep it somewhere airtight, or it'll start to go sticky quite quickly.
Assembly
Once the ice-cream has had a few hours of intermittent stirring-up, it's time to add the praline. I added about half of it, and kept the other half for sprinkling on top later.
Stir the praline through, and put the mixture back in the freezer, this time to freeze unbothered by any stirring. (The lurking bottle of rum in the background is there because I thought it might be interesting to add a capful on account of the raisins in the buns - a sort of rum and raisin effect. Feel free to do the same, or not.) You'll need to take it out of the freezer twenty minutes or so before you want to eat it, to let it soften (that, or give it a teeny 10-second burst in the microwave...)
The verdict
Yum. If I were doing this again I might stop the caramel before it got quite so dark - it's properly burnt sugar-y - but overall this is really nice. I actually like what the hot cross buns bring - the occasional raisins and little bursts of citrus are really nice. (Oh, and it works really well as an ice-cream sandwich shoved between a couple of Bonne Maman biscuits, which handily come in twos...)
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