Wasabi Ice cream Fruit Pudding

I made this Wasabi Ice cream pudding as a special dessert for Christmas and received rave reviews about it. This time I even managed to take photos of how it turned out. You will need to start it a couple of days earlier just to give it time to fully freeze.

Frozen Wasabi Ice cream Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

2 x 2 litre tubs Vanilla Ice Cream (I actually used French Vanilla)
200 gms Glace Cherries – chopped
150 gms shelled Pistachio nuts – roughly chopped*
20 ml Cointreau liqueur (optional)
125 gms strawberries – hulled and roughly chopped
150 gms raspberries (if frozen they need to be partly thawed)
2 tsp Namida® Wasabi Paste made from Namida® 100% Pure Wasabi Powder
2 Tbsp Icing Sugar

Method

1. Lightly grease a wide mouth and deep bowl. I used a plastic mixing bowl, but any will do so long as it is big enough to hold the 4 litres of ice cream. 🙂
2. Line the inside of the bowl with plastic food wrap.
3. Remove both tubs of the ice cream from the freezer.
4. Remove 1 litre of the ice cream and put it into a container and refreeze.
5. Leave the other 3 litres of ice cream out and allow to thaw at room temperature until softened enough to stir (do not allow to fully melt).
6. Place the thawed ice cream into a large mixing bowl.
7. Add the chopped glace cherries, Cointreau liqueur and pistachios to the ice cream and mix throughly.
8. Place the mix carefully into the lined bowl.
9. Oil up the outside of a 1 litre preserving jar with a vegetable oil.
10. Into the centre of the ice cream mixture in the bowl place the oiled 1 litre Agee jar (or similar) and tape into position so that it doesn’t fall over. See attached photo. Be careful that you don’t push the jar all the way to the bowl – we want to form a pocket, not a hole.

    

11. Place carefully in the freezer and leave overnight to fully set.
12. In the morning remove the frozen dessert from the freezer and carefully remove the tapes.
13. Pour warm (not hot) water into the jar and you will find the jar will slip right out leaving a nice deep pocket in the centre.
14. Replace bowl with the ice cream back into the freezer.
15. Remove the 1 litre of vanilla ice cream previously reserved and allow it to become soft.
16. Mash together the chopped strawberries, icing sugar and partly frozen raspberries together with Namida® Wasabi Paste.
17. Stir the mashed fruit mix in with the softened ice cream. It should produce a dense, slightly icy mixture.
18. Now remove the bowl from the freezer and spoon the fruit mixture into the centre. Pack it down firmly. You should end up with some fruit mixture over.
19. Replace the bowl and the left over fruit mixture back into the freezer until required.
20. To serve, invert the frozen bowl over a serving dish and warm the bowl. I cheated a little because I used a plastic mixing bowl and just pulled the bowl away from the dessert and placed the base into a sink of cold water. This loosened the dessert enough from the bowl mould so that it just fell out onto the serving dish.
21. Remove the plastic wrap and you should end up with a dessert that looks like this.

    

22. Serve this immediately as it will start to soften reasonably quickly.
23. Cut the Wasabi Ice cream pudding with a sharp knife. The picture below shows what the inner pocket should look like.

    

24. This wasabi Ice cream pudding will serve 20 people or so. Enjoy!

* Try and find shelled pistachio nuts. I could only get unshelled ones and I found that shelling them and removing the inner membrane took as long to do as the rest of the exercise.

Note: The addition of the wasabi paste to the inner fruit mixture intensifies the fruit flavour without adding any more sweetness to the dessert. Everyone who tried it came back for seconds and no one guessed that wasabi was even involved in the recipe. The extra fruit mash and ice cream mixture I served in a separate bowl for people to add if they wanted. I didn’t have any of this left at the end of the evening. 🙂

The best Wasabi to use with this Wasabi Ice Cream Fruit Pudding is Namida 100% Pure Wasabia japonica Powder, which can be purchased here.