Great ice cream, as usual. We made a smaller portion, making half a recipe but using 3 egg yolks. Also, we used the 3 cinnamon sticks we still had and added an extra 1 tsp ground cinnamon. The result was creamy and had just the right amount of cinnamon.

We served the ice cream as part of our Big Mac dessert: store-bought Lebkuchen (photo) as buns, the Cinnamon Ice Cream shaped into patties, store-bought cranberry sauce as tomato ketchup, mint leaves as salad and Orangettes as french fries - it looked really good!

I really, really loved this ice cream! My husband was less enthousiast - he thought the flavour of the lavender was too strong. He as a point, as we used honey with a strong flavour we had been given recently by a bekeeper, and if you use an ordinary honey that doesn't have such a strong flavour, the lavender would probably be overpowering.

In any way, lavender makes a great ice cream. It works less well as Lavender Crème Brûlée

We served it as a 'grand dessert' with Chocolate Brownies (shaped with cookie cutters; top left), raspberry coulis, top right, and Lemon Mousse served in a coffee cup, bottom left - the ice cream went really well with the brownies, the rest got lost a bit. Scattered inbetween are fresh raspberries, they looked nicer than they do in the photo.

Very nice ice cream, though you really need to like Szechuan pepper. I knew it wasn't a 'real' pepper, and yet I was slightly surprised that it didn't taste like pepper at all (we actually thought it tasted a bit like cloves); I just guess I could really see an Orange and Proper Pepper Ice Cream work just as well.

We served it together with Kahlúa Chocolate Mousse and Almond and Orange Florentines, which made a perfect combination! Other recipes we (re-)visited today: Lavender Lemonade, Apple Pie with an Almond Crust, Black Ravioli with Snapper and Prawn and Fig-Stuffed Roast Pork Loin with Fig and Balsamic Jam.

Really, really delicious! I have only one criticism, which is also why this is a 4 star rating instead of 5, which is that I hardly noticed the cherries. There were just too few of them, and/or their flavour wasn't really strong; additionally, I would have expected a sauce or syrup to be folded into the ice cream. Next time we'll probably double the amount of cherries, keep some of the syrup apart and boil it down into a thick syrup which we can then fold into the ice cream at the very end.

We used Sour Cherries in Syrup for this recipe, and served it with Chocolate Brownies, a great combination!

Edited one day later:
We took another jar, and just boiled it down until it had just a little syrup left, then carefully folded that into the ice cream. Guess what? We thought it was too much, it made the toasted almonds disappear. I guess 1 1/2 jars (275-300g) would be just right.

DH additionally mentioned that he thought the almond extract wasn't necessary and gave a weird flavour - I didn't even notice and think you would taste the almonds even less then. Or maybe just stick to the original amount of cherries (with a little syrup), and omit the almond extract?

It's very delicious - but only for the first three spoonfuls or so. After that, it becomes sickening sweet. It helps a lot to serve this with a tangy sauce (i.e. cranberry sauce), but I wouldn't serve it on it's own. I doubt that the sour cherry sauce given in the book is tangy enough to counterbalance the sweetness of this ice cream, but we haven't tried that yet.

We had intended to serve this mousse together with Sour Cherries in Syrup and the Kahlúa Chocolate Mousse for DH's birthday dinner; I'm glad we tested the both ice cream and mousse recipes before. Apart from the sweetness issue, the white chocolate ice cream couldn't hold up against the mousse; the mousse definitely required something fresh. I'm lobbying to pair the mousse off with with the Orange and Szechwan Pepper Ice Cream or maybe the Chocolate-Tangerine Sorbet - we'll see what he'll decide.