Roasted Banana Ice Cream

There are hazaar recipes that we bookmark to make later. Some of them we, thankfully, do get around to trying before they get lost in the oblivion of the must-do lists. This particular list is now threatening to become an avtar of Hanuman’s ever elongating tail. 🙂

Melissa showcased a recipe from David Lebovitz’ Perfect Scoop on A Traveler’s Lunchbox a few weeks ago that caught my eye. I am always looking for what to do with over-ripe bananas. If I buy bananas in excess of one 🙂 , there is always one that cannot be saved. And with inflation at 6%, they are not as inexpensive as they used to be. Besides, I hate to throw food. Barely over-ripe bananas are brimming with goodness and full of flavour. The other thing is that while my son won’t eat bananas, he’ll eat things with bananas in them, banana nut muffins being his favourite banana treat.

I have served baked bananas as dessert many times. Slit bananas sprinkled with brown sugar, lemon juice, and cinnamon, baked till soft, served with or without ice cream. That sugary lemony sauce looks and tastes divine, full of the ripeness of bananas. But banana in ice cream sounded intriguing. And there they were, three ripe bananas, calling out.

Without adding to the preamble let me get to the recipe, which has been altered ever so slightly to use ingredients at hand. Instead of whole milk I used regular (3%) milk with some cream. Visits to all the neighbourhood markets yielded one 2 years old pack of brown sugar. I opted to skip that in favour of regular sugar! Adding some rum soaked raisins seemed like a good idea (they had been occupying precious space in the fridge since I made that trifle!). And, recalling my Caribbean Bananas (that is what that baked banana recipe was called in my book), I adding a little cinnamon as well.

The result was an ice cream we all allowed ourselves to like. The taste of bananas in ice cream was new to us all, and the garden lemon added an interesting and fragrantly refreshing note. It was concluded a winner! TH, whose palate is all for textural complexity, thought it would be greatly enhanced by the addition of some sort of nuts, such as roasted cashews. We went ahead and sprinkled some on top, and it was good. It was a tad bit too sweet as I didn’t adjust for the extra sweetness of Indian sugar as I usually do. I will be surely making this ice cream again.

Roasted Banana Ice Cream
(based on David Lebovitz’ recipe as reproduced on The Traveler’s Lunchbox)
Serves 3-4

3 ripe bananas
1/3 C sugar (preferably brown sugar) + 2 T regular white sugar
1 T butter
1 t vanilla essence
1 C milk (I used 3%)
½ C fresh cream (chilled)
1 ½ t lemon juice
½ t salt
½ t cinnamon powder
1/8 C raisins soaked in 2 T dark rum

Peel the bananas and cut into 1 inch chunks. In a glass baking dish take the banana pieces and brown sugar, and toss with the butter. Bake for 40 minutes (preheated to 400F/200C), till browned, turning just once in the middle of the baking process.

Remove the contents of the baking dish into a mixing bowl. Add the all the other ingredients except raisins, and blend to a smooth puree. Mix in the raisins and any nuts, if using, and pour into an ice cream maker to set in the fridge. (I used the plastic container of store-bought ice cream to chill mine, blended it once after 2 hours of chilling.)

To serve, scoop into bowls and top with roasted cashews and a sauce of choice, if desired. The syrupy sauce made during the baking process would be great – just be sure to adjust quantities to make extra.

A little sweet for all the Mother’s on Mother’s Day today.

This is my entry to Coffee’s Monthly Blog Patrol: Something Sweet.