When you pick bucketfuls of strawberries every other day from the garden, you have to come up with novel ways of using the fruit up before they go bad. And although icecream is hardly anything novel, it’s just perfect for a sunny day. It also gave me an excuse to use my recently acquired signed copy of ‘The Perfect Scoop’ by David Lebovitz. Notice that I mention ‘signed’.

One of the highlights of our recent visit to Paris was attending a book signing event with the man himself – a great opportunity to meet one of my favourite food writers in person. And since I already have most of his other books (in a box somewhere in a Dublin storage facility), I decided to go for ‘The Perfect Scoop’ – a collection of his icecream and sorbet recipes.

It came in handy when I had to look up an easy strawberry icecream recipe. One of the few changes I made to the original recipe from the book was to use only heavy cream instead of a combination of sour cream and heavy cream.

It’s quite a simple thing to do once you have an icecream making machine. Apart from the two hours taken to prepare the strawberry-cream mixture, everything else is quite hassle free with the machine and your freezer doing the rest of the work.

So if you happen to have a punnet of strawberries on hand and don’t know what to do with it, try out this recipe.

Strawberry Icecream (adapted from an original David Lebovitz recipe)

Ingredients (Makes about 1 and a quarter litres)

around 450g fresh strawberries rinsed and hulled

150g sugar

1 tbsp vodka or kirsch – I used creme de cassis instead as this is what I had on hand

around 500ml heavy cream

1 tsp lemon juice

Method

Slice any big strawberries into halves and place all of the fruit in a large bowl with the sugar and liquer.  Stir to let the sugar dissolve. Cover and let it stand on your kitchen counter for around an hour.

After an hour, transfer the contents of the bowl to a blender along with the cream, sugar and lemon juice. Blend the mixture until it’s smooth (you can leave it a bit chunky if you like).

Refrigerate the mixture for an hour and then transfer it to your icecream machine and let it do its thing.

Once the icecream is ready, transfer the container to your freezer. Make sure you take it out of the freezer well before you serve it so it is nice and soft. I had to leave it out for a good half hour or so before it got to the right consistency.

Enjoy it on it’s own or as an accompaniment to a variety of desserts – cakes, pies or whatever takes your fancy.