Adventures in Ice Cream

Here’s a finished copy of my new summ... Bring your story to life - three simp...

Adventures in Ice Cream

My new novel, Vivien’s Heavenly Ice Cream Shop, is the story of two sisters who inherit a Brighton ice cream parlour, and it’s out today. Here it is:

With subject matter as tasty as this, research is obviously key! So I wanted to talk you through the delicious journey I went on while writing this book. I’d highly recommend trying out a few of these places for yourselves…

Stop 1 – Training up!

The Artisan School of Food, Nottinghamshire

In the novel, Anna and Imogen make gourmet ice cream from scratch, so I wanted to learn how to do so too. I spent a really inspiring day at The Artisan School of Food, in a stunning countryside setting, training up with Kitty Travers of La Grotta Ices. Our recipes included made-by-hand recipes as well as ones using an ice cream maker, all with fresh, seasonal ingredients at their heart.

My favourites were the quince ice cream – using heaps of fresh, juicy fruit – and the pear and ginger sorbet. I can still taste the fresh flavours in that sorbet if I think about it. Kitty talked us through the stages step-by-step and made it all seem surprisingly easy, then at the end of the day we had a grand tasting with the other students. YUM.

Me hard at work whipping up some quince ice cream

Tasting the Rosemary Grape Granita we’d made… really fresh

I never realised there were so many different kinds of vanilla

Stop 1 – Sampling London’s delights

The place that first kicked off my interest in gourmet ice cream was Gelupo, on Archer Street near Piccadilly Circus – if you’re in central London, definitely stop by for a cone. This pistachio-toned authentically Italian parlour serves up a stunning range of sorbets, gelato and delicious textured granitas.

Next, I stopped by Chin Chin Labs in Camden, which is fun for the spectacle – this is a science-lab style parlour where men in white coats and goggles make your ice cream in front of you, using liquid nitrogen. This week’s flavour is blueberry and dark chocolate chip - munch on yours outside sitting on one of the rope swings.

Kings Cross Ice Cream Festival – this took place by Regents Canal (where, back the in the nineteenth century, they’d bring in ice from frozen lakes in Norway to make ice cream with). It was a great day, with talks about the history of ice cream, including the story of Carlo Gatti, the Italian who invented the Penny Lick, the cheap ice that made ice cream accessible for everyone.

After the talks, it was time to check out the many stalls and vans - my top taste of the day was a chocolate and salted caramel ice cream in a waffle cone. We stopped by Mad Cap Charlie’s nitrogen ice cream buggy and tried port and stilton ice cream, followed by a sample of beef, horseradish and Yorkshire pud – not sure I’ll be revisiting that, but he certainly gets full marks for experimentation! He’s currently working on a glow-in-the-dark recipe using luminescence from jellyfish. Incredible.

Stop 3 – Florence

No ice cream research would becomplete without a visit to Italy, the home of gelato. In the novel, Anna studies ice-cream making in Florence, and falls in love with the city and its flavours – and after a long weekend there I felt very much the same. After climbing the spectacular Duomo (cathedral) crossing the Ponte Vecchio, and relaxing over a lazy lunch, we finished the day with Frutti de Bosco (fruits of the forest) gelato at Vivoli, a traditional ice cream parlour. Unbeatable.

View from the stairwell of the Duomo (cathedral) - I loved these padlocks with lovers’ intials etched into them, and they went on to feature in the novel