Difficulty: Medium

Ingredients:

• ½ cup of milk
• another ½ cup of milk
• 2 cups of cream (not thickened cream)
• 1 egg, beaten
• ¾ cup of sugar
• 10 tsp of green tea leaf. Or, if you only have tea bags, cut them from the bags.
• 1 Buddha’s hand – use a green one as it is more intense than one that has gone yellow (use a lemon if you cannot get a Buddha's hand)
   

Method

1. Heat ½ cup of milk in a pan and when quite warm add the green tea and let it steep for a minute or two still over the heat.
2. The tea will soak up most of the milk so pour in the other ½ cup of milk after the tea has steeped for the first minute.
3. Pour the milk and tea through a fine sieve so that the milk goes in to another pot. Gently push the tea leaves with the back of a spoon to get all the milk out of the leaves. Discard the leaves.
4. At this point the milk will taste very bitter but don’t worry. Return milk to the heat and add in the cream, beaten egg and sugar.
5. All the fragrance and flavour comes from the skin of the Buddha’s hand there is no flavour in the white pith. Using a vegetable peeler, peel thin strips of the green skin off the Buddha's hand – I peeled as much off the fruit as I could get at – and add this to the milk mixture.
6. Heat the milk and stir so as to dissolve the sugar. Allow the Buddha's hand skin to steep in the milk for at least 10 minutes. Remove pan from the heat and remove the skin peelings. Transfer the mixture to a shallow bowl and place in the freezer to chill down.
7. Once cold enough, pour mix into ice cream machine and churn until you arrive at the desired consistency. Depending on your machine this could take between 30 minutes to an hour.
8. Put the ice cream in a bowl or container and leave in the freezer until you are ready to serve. Keep in mind ice cream made like this will melt very quickly so it is often better to serve in a chilled martini type glass with a little fruit on the top as garnish if you wish. If you leave the ice cream in the freezer for a couple of days it will become harder.
    

Note: Ice cream makers are available at most department stores for between $50 and $100 depending on the brand. If you don't have one, you can whip the mixture with electric beaters, place back in freezer, then whip again with beaters when the mixture is getting slushy and icy.