Strawberry Coconut Ice

If you’ve been following my blog for some time, you might recall the Ice Cream Slice recipe I posted a little over a year ago. Many of you tried the recipe with much success and wrote to tell me about it, so since then I’ve been keeping an eye out for another easy and delicious frozen recipe to share with you.

In the issue of BBC Olive from which I got the Bacon Cornbread recipe, I also chanced upon this simple recipe for Strawberry Coconut Ice. The ingredient list is encouragingly short – coconut milk, dessicated coconut, strawberries, heavy cream, vanilla, and a tiny bit of sugar. And the method is very similar to the Ice Cream Slice method – you whip your cream, stir in your milk (in this case coconut milk instead of condensed milk), stir in your other stuff, and freeze. A few hours later, you get a visually-pleasing frozen dessert.

The problem with the original recipe, though, is that it doesn’t ask for nearly enough sugar. Everyone who tried the dessert agreed that it could have been significantly sweeter (not something you hear that often about a dessert!). So in this post I’ve tweaked the recipe a little, to incorporate more sugar and more strawberries. It’s fundamentally a good recipe – cool, creamy and sweet, with a tinge of sour from the strawberries. I just think it’d be much better if you up’ed the sweet and the sour =)

Strawberry Coconut Ice
(adapted from August 2011 issue of BBC Olive)

Ingredients:

• 300 ml thickened/heavy/double cream
• 6 tbsp caster sugar
• 300 ml coconut milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
• 120g desiccated coconut
• 250g strawberries, hulled

Directions:

1. Get hold of a regular 8-inch square cake pan, and line with either aluminum foil or parchment paper. (To line with parchment paper, arrange two strips of parchment paper in a cross shape inside the pan. Make sure both strips are long enough to go up the sides of the pan with a bit of overhang.

2. Using an electric mixer, beat the cream with 2 tbsp 0f caster sugar till soft peaks form. (Be careful not to overbeat the cream.) Gently stir in the coconut milk, vanilla and dessicated coconut.

3. Pour half the coconut mixture into the cake pan, smoothen it out using a spatula or the back of a spoon, and put in the freezer. Put the other half of the coconut mixture into the refrigerator.

4. Using a blender, puree the strawberries with the remaining 4 tbsp of caster sugar. Remove the coconut mixture from the refrigerator and stir in the strawberry puree. When the plain coconut mixture in the freezer is almost frozen, pour the strawberry coconut mixture over it, smoothen it out, and put the pan back into the freezer.

5. When it is time to serve, remove the strawberry coconut ice from the pan, sprinkle remaining desiccated coconut over the top, and serve in slices.