For the second bloggers scream for ice cream challenge, I challenged you to recreate a favourite childhood ice cream experience or flavour.

I hope you enjoy the wonderfully wide range of memories and recipes as much as I have.

Here are all the entries, in date order of posting!

Well known supper club host and blogger, Uyen, was the first to post a recipe to her Leluu blog, Having left Vietnam as a child, Uyen’s posts about her return trips to the country of her birth are a joy to read, and a fascinating insight into both culture, cuisine and family. In this post she tells how, on her first visit back since the family’s exile, just one taste of a fridge-cold jar of Vietnamese yoghurt transported her a couple of decades back to her childhood. On her most recent trip to Vietnam, her cousin shared a recipe for Vietnamese frozen yoghurt, which combines condensed milk and long life milk with yoghurt.

Ren of Fabulicious Food asks all of you, when did you last have a banana split? She paints a picture of a long gone café at Warren Beach in North Wales; she can still remember the white painted walls and sandy floors and the fact that the order was always the same – a banana split. Her recipe calls for bananas, soft ice cream, whipped cream, cherries and chocolate sauce. A great reminder that simple classics should not be forgotten.

When I read Jo’s entry for the challenge, on Comfort Bites, I was reminded of one of my own personal favourites, the wonderfully simple coke float. In her post, Jo calls on handy science-bod Alex to explain the magical alchemy that occurs when combining just two ingredients, coke and vanilla ice cream. The thick, creamy, bubbly foam has a taste that is altogether different from either coke or vanilla ice cream! I’d have said magic, but read Jo’s post to understand what really happens!

Jason of Feast To The World grew up in Singapore and Malaysia. When the familiar ice cream bell sounded, it wasn’t a van that appeared, but a man on a scooter, with a large freezer compartment on the back of the bike. Jason loved the ice cream wafer, a rectangular block of ice cream sandwiched between wafer biscuits. For this month’s challenge, he created this pretty pandan ice cream wafer, using pandan leaves to flavour the ice cream and filo pastry for the wafers.

Have you ever come across the combination of honey and Marmite? No? Me neither, but as soon as I read Ed’s post on Rocket & Squash, I couldn’t understand why I’d never thought to combine them myself. This strange mix, which Ed calls Homite, has been a family favourite for years but it’s only recently that Ed thought to make it into an ice cream flavour. He tried three custard-based variations of Homite ice cream, so pick your favourite and give it a go!

I was hoping someone might tackle the infamous arctic roll. And Jennie from Things I Eat did just that! She made a rich, cream custard which she churned and then formed into a sausage shape. Next came the Swiss roll sponge, with care to keep it moist and pliable. Jennie spread it with a layer of strawberry jam and rolled it around the ice cream sausage, eh voila! I’m very tempted by this one, though may call on Pete to help me make the cake and do the rolling!

Until I read Laura from How to cook good food‘s post I had completely forgotten about choc ices and yet we must have eaten hundreds during our childhood! Laura used shop-bought Ambrosia for a retro-tasting yellow vanilla ice cream which she cut into blocks and thickly coated with melted chocolate. I particularly like the thickness of the chocolate – the shop bought choc ices were always a bit mean on that front!

With a shared birthday, my sister and I had many shared birthday parties when we were kids. Mum would make us fabulous themed cakes, we’d dress up in our favourite party clothes and friends would come round and play musical statues, pass the parcel and pin the tail on the donkey. One of our favourite party foods was the home made knickerbocker glories we’d help mum to assemble, featuring layers of fruit and jelly, ice cream, whipped cream, cherries and chocolate or fruit sauce. My sister gave me these lovely sundae glasses a couple of years back and finally, I found the perfect recipe for them.

Much as Miss South of North South Food might remember the delights of a bag of Haribo, her grown up tastebuds just aren’t as keen on super sweet as they might once have been. But the sweet and sharp tang of fizzy cola bottles, the kind that make your mouth contort in delight, are another thing entirely. And that’s where she took inspiration for her very clever fizzy cola bottle sorbet. When she mentioned that her ice cream machine reminded her of a Mr Frosty machine, I was instantly transported back to my own memories of laboriously shaving ice in a snowman’s belly!

I said last week that Kate aka The Little Loaf is the ice cream queen! Having seen the frankly fabulous entries that had preceded her, I was starting to doubt she could hold onto that crown. But once again I was blown away by her creativity when I read about her creme egg ice cream. Like Miss South, Kate’s tastes have moved on from the ‘sickly fondant slop’ that fills the well known confectionary creme eggs, so she made a subtle fior di latte (flower of milk) ice cream that reminded her of Mr Whippy, another childhood memory, poured it into a milk chocolate shell and used passion fruit for the yolk.

When I saw Karen from Lavender & Lovage‘s entry for this month’s challenge, I figured that great minds think alike! Karen too opted to make knickerbocker glories! Like mine, her suggested ingredients include tinned and fresh fruit, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream and syrup. Unlike mine, her list doesn’t have jelly but does have hundreds and thousands and wafers! What we both agree on is that there’s no exact recipe, and that you should layer up your own choice of deliciousness. What I most love about Karen’s post is the nostalgic passages about what she finds when she meanders down her own memory lane.

Corina, who writes Searching for spice, relates the story of a childhood holiday to Spain where she discovered the delights of many flavours of ice cream, her favourite being kiwi fruit ice cream, which she ate every single day. I can almost feel the anticipation she experienced in the run up to the second trip, only to be crushingly disappointed when the flavour was no longer available! All these years later, she has recreated her beloved kiwi fruit ice cream at home!

When she was little, Sharon from Smithycraft would only eat white ice cream. Not even yellow vanilla would do; it had to be brilliant white. So, when she saw the theme of the challenge, she determined to create her own very white ice. Having determined that egg yolks would give it a yellow colour, Sharon created a recipe for a gelato-style ice cream, using raw goat’s milk, dried milk powder, caster sugar and vanilla extract. Not even the flecks of vanilla beans could be allowed to sully the pristine white!

The ice cream that Jacqui, from There’s Proper Food In There Somewhere, ate most as a child was also vanilla. Only on trips to her nan’s, holidays abroad or the obligatory trip to National Trust properties did she encounter a wider range. Whilst her dad would always choose pistachio, and her mum loved strawberry, Jacqui was irresistably drawn to exotic rum and raisin ice cream. Unlike those childhood versions, her recipe uses real rum instead of flavouring. The real deal!

Gary from Big Spud grew up in South Essex. In his area, the ice cream brand that comes to mind first isn’t Wall’s, Lyons Maid, or Haagen-Dazs but Rossi’s. Gary has strong memories of the Rossi’s van visiting his street after school, and of popping to their shop on the Marine Parade and the kiosk on Southend High Street. For him, the best flavour was the lemon sorbet, known as lemon ice. Smooth, with a vivid yellow colour, Gary used a really strong syrup combined with gelatine to recreate Rossi’s lemon ice.

And there you have it – all fifteen BSFIC entries and a lovely stroll down memory lane, not to mention some delicious ice cream ideas to try at home.

The April challenge will be announced shortly, do join in if you can!