Top tips for festive gelato by Henley Bridge Ice Cream & Gelato Technician Mark Eastman.
Use slow-moving gelato flavours to make your chocolates to avoid throwing them away. For example, coat balls of orange gelato in dark chocolate and freeze down to make festive chocolate orange treats.
For a super-easy, grown-up festive dessert, pipe some new Jersey Dairy chocolate soft mix ice cream – with vanilla soft serve if you have a twin machine - into a chocolate waffle basket. Drizzle with Rubicone Bailey cream topping sauce and sprinkle with Irca milk chocolate compound vermicelli. Garnish with a Hillbo dark chocolate and gold triangle or some Wrights of Lymm edible gold leaf.
Make gelato snowmen by moulding two white chocolate spheres, one smaller than the other. Backfill with ice cream then sit the smaller sphere on top of the larger one. Decorate with chocolate eyes, carrot nose, buttons etc. Serve on a stick, in a cone or on a plate.
Use soft serve ice cream to create delicious alcoholic milkshakes in a variety of Christmassy flavours such as Baileys and Amaretto. Garnish with Hillbo marbled chocolate sticks and Hillbo gold coloured dark chocolate rizo curls.
Similarly, use surplus gelato to make Magnum-style lollies by moulding them and dipping in chocolate or glazes and freezing down. Try Rubicone rainbow green or rainbow red coating with sprinkles for vibrant festive shades.
Blank off pans and fill them with individual half of your display takeaway desserts, and gelato chocolates, which you can offer as a pick n mix in insulated takeaway tubs.
Keep your core range of gelato flavours (chocolate vanilla and strawberry), as these have year-round appeal, but add in a few seasonal flavours, such as mince pie, Christmas pudding and amaretto, to give your display a festive feel.
Use your soft serve machine to create a vibrant green Christmas tree ice cream cone by adding colour to Jersey Dairy ice cream mix. Use topping sauce and glitter spray to create tinsel bunting and decorate with Mona Lisa biscuit balls coated in ruby chocolate and Mona Lisa buttercurlies and top with a Hillbo dark chocolate mini star.
Make an ice cream Santa by placing a scoop of strawberry gelato in a cone. Pre-make some googly eyes using dark and white chocolate. Then take a red Pidy mini cone, dip it in white chocolate around the outer edge then dip in desiccated coconut to make a rim for Santa’s hat. Add a white mini marshmallow on top for the pom-pom. Add a squirt of whipped cream to create Santa’s beard. On the same cones to make Santa’s elves, and black cones to create hats for ice cream snowmen.
