Serves 8-10

I ended up making this once because I had bits of left over ice-cream all over my freezer. The layers of different ice-cream, with biscuit in between is really impressive and you can make it as big or small as you want to. You can use any flavour combinations and make this as a cake for a special family birthday, decorated with meringues, fresh fruit, wafers and other sweets.

Here’s What Goes In

For the base:

• 1 packet of Tennis biscuits, crushed (200g)
• 125g of butter, melted

For the Strawberry Ice-cream:

• 500g of strawberries
• 1 and a half cups of sugar
• One cup of water
• 1 cup of heavy cream

Add a tub of vanilla or other flavoured ice-cream of your choice.

How To Do It

For the base: The easiest way to crush the biscuits is to empty them into a zip seal bag and gently crush them with a rolling pin or another suitably heavy object. Combine the biscuits with the melted butter in a mixing bowl. Press this mixture firmly into a greased spring form cake tin, with a diameter of approximately 23cm. Use the back of a metal spoon to smooth it down and then refrigerate the crust while you prepare the next layer.

For the Ice-cream: Before you begin, place the cup of cream in the freezer so that it can chill and thicken. Combine the water and sugar in a small saucepan and allow to simmer until the sugar has melted. Remove from the heat and set aside to cool. Blitz the strawberries, and strain and press the mixture through a sieve to remove the seeds (which you will discard). Add the strawberry mixture to the sugar syrup and pop it into the fridge for 30 minutes. Then add the chilled cream to this mixture and stir well to combine. Pour into your ice-cream maker and set it according to the manufacturer’s instruction to make a creamy ice-cream. Mine takes roughly an hour. You can freeze this until you’re ready to use it, bearing in mind that it should be reasonably soft when you want to layer it in the cake tin.

If your vanilla ice-cream is frozen solid, allow it to thaw a bit so that it is malleable and you can easily spread it as an ice-cream layer.

To assemble the cake, spread half of the strawberry ice-cream over the biscuit base. Follow that up with a layer of vanilla ice-cream, and then finally a strawberry layer again. Cover the cake with cling film and place it in the freezer for at least 4 hours or overnight.

To serve, gently extract the cake from the spring form pan, place it on a beautiful plate and decorate it as desired – I used fresh strawberries and meringue.