Incredible ice cream and hilarious hot chocolate

This is really a recipe for hot chocolate of incredible dissolution value, but I will start off by mentioning my other favourite produce from the hot chocolate ingredient mongers.

Meadow Cottage Farmhouse Dairy Produce do incredible things with the milk from their Jersey herd. We shall come to the cream and milk, but their ice cream merits a special mention. Indeed, it’s the best ice cream I’ve ever eaten. Here’s me enjoying some:

Davy going bonkers for maple pecan ice cream

Every flavour we’ve tried has been charged with a rich, round, voluptuously hedonistic texture and flavoured with skill and style. I normally detest rum and raisin ice cream because of the horrible artificial rum flavours people use. Meadow Cottage use serious Jamaican rum and the raisins are plumply engorged with it. Incomparably better than all other rum and raisin ice cream.

There is a butter toffee flavour that oozes come-hither sweetness and seduction, this could well be my favourite. Their maple pecan vies for this place in my affections with its powerfully complex flavours.

For such a small enterprise they have quite a range of ravishing ice cream flavours, and at this time of the morning I cannot think of one you’d want to avoid. You can buy their goods at  Hampshire Farmers’ Market but they do not attend every one every time. They have a farm shop at Meadow Cottage Farm, Churt Road, Headley, Bordon GU35 8SS Telephone 01428 712 155.

In addition to buying a modest three litres of their ice cream at the last Hampshire Farmers’ Market we also scored ingredients for hot chocolate – hot chocolate to soothe the nerves of whilst deeply gratifying the dissolute night-time beverage drinker.

Two make two mugs of hot chocolate. Mix half a pint of the richest Jersey cream you can find with half a pint of the richest Jersey milk you can find (Meadow Cottage deliver with style with these). You know you are on the right track if these are distinctly yellow. Give them a stir until you have a rich cream/milk emulsion, then pour about 0.5-1cm of this joyous juice into the bottom of each of your two mugs.

Put the rest of the cardiac crash cream construction into a milk pan and set it to warm over a highish heat. In the short time you have before that boils get one and one half heaped teaspoons of Cadbury’s drinking chocolate power and add that amount to each mug. Under no circumstances use any of the filth that says you should mix it with water, or makes any disingenuous claims about being tasty whilst helping you slim. Beat up the chocolate power with the creamy milk mixture in each mug until it forms a thin paste.

Soon your pan of fatty fun will begin to foam violently, the very second it does this lift it from the heat to prevent it boiling over. Pour half into each mug, stir vigorously and indulge in delight. It’s rather nice to eat the creamy foam bits off the top of your mug with a spoon as it’s cooling to a drinkable temperature.

When I had a sleeping problem and every doctor in the country queued up to give me the same, vastly unhelpful, shamefully patronising advice about sleep hygiene. One even talked this crap to me when I hadn’t slept for 11 nights and I so needed to sleep I was incredibly incoherent and barkingly bonkers. One of the endlessly repeated suggestions was to have a warm, milky drink before bed. Fat lot of good that did I was bloody minded in my florid psychosis for such reasonable and mild aids to touch me. Hell’s bells I was so unhappy and damaged.

However, if you are more normal yet have problems dropping off I can confidently state the Elitistreview cream-tastic hot chocolate drink will soothe you into as deep and relaxing slumber as I revel in every night now I’ve pushed insomnia off a cliff and cuddled up to that invaluable ally ‘healthy sleep’.

I could go on and on about this, but I’m so happy and so much more functional now I sleep well – hooray! My life has been transformed by getting 8 hours of quality sleep a night.

So remember: 50% Jersey cream, 50% Jersey milk, big grins and then blissful slumber.