How to make Japanese Tempura Icecream - recipe

Everyone has probably tried fried ice cream before but here is something a little different. How to make Japanese Tempura Icecream - the Japanese tempura batter is really light and make a nice crispy and crunchy shell around your favourite Japanese ice-cream flavours. The hot crispy batter matches really well with the soft, smooth and creamy ice cream inside.

This ice cream recipe isn't too difficult to make, the tricky part is to have the oil hot enough to cook and crisp up the tempura batter before the ice cream melts.

The ingredients needed are:

    1 cup of plain flour
    1 egg
    1 cup of  ice-cold water
    1 teaspoon of baking soda
    1 teaspoon of vanilla extract just to give the tempura a little taste, I like it but you can drop it if you want
    Enough vegetable oil to deep fry - not olive oil or any other that has a flavour
    1/2 a litre of ice cream, what ever flavour you want, try just vanilla to start with. (here is a great recipe for vanilla ice cream) or maybe a nice sea-salt ice cream.

How to make it:

Just use any old ice cream scoop to scoop out and make nice, even sized ice cream balls and put them on a tray ready to use back in the freezer to get as frozen as possible. Have them in the freezer for at least a couple of hours - even better, do this the day before.

Pour the oil into a deep fryer or a big saucepan, enough so that you can deep fry the tempura balls. I would say have the oil on a medium to high heat, as I said before not to low because the ice cream will melt before the batter is cooked and too high the batter will over cook on the outside before the inside is done. The oil temperature should be about 200c.

In a mixing bowl sift the flour and baking soda together, do it twice to make sure.

Beat the egg in a bowl, just a little, say until the yolk has broken and is just beginning to froth up.

Then add the vanilla and the ice-cold water to the beaten egg and mix well.

Combine the egg and flour mixtures and whisk them until they are just combined, don't over whisk, that is the trick with tempura and how to keep it light. Don't worry if there are still a couple of lumps still. A great tip is to have this bowl on ice so the batter stays cold.

Get your frozen ice cream balls out of the freezer, take one and dip it into the tempura batter - make sure it is covered evenly.

Drop the ice cream ball into the hot oil - very carefully and cook until it is just slightly golden - tempura doesn't go a rich golden colour like regular batter. Probably 30 seconds is all that is needed.

Remove the tempura ice cream ball and serve it straight away while it is still crispy. A little bit of icing sugar on top is nice.

Yum, eat it up!