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Irish Examiner
28-06-2025
- General
- Irish Examiner
Michelle Darmody: How to make the classic ice-cream sandwich — and the mistakes to avoid
Who doesn't love an ice cream sandwich? When I visited Australia a few years ago, there was a bakery near where I was staying which served about 15 different varieties, all delicious. They made the sandwiches with their own churned ice cream and homemade biscuits. It was a real treat to visit in the heat of the day. The same place also specialised in ice-cream cakes, which were a wonder. Layers of different-colour ice creams moulded, and piled high. I know I would have been very excited if one arrived at the birthday table when I was a child. The recipe here is a little simpler, but hopefully equally as tasty and refreshing. The biscuits do not get overly crisp so are nice to bite into alongside the soft centre. I find if the biscuit or cookie is too crisp, it makes the ice cream squelch out as you are eating it. A soft and chewy American style chocolate chip cookie works very well for example, while a snappy ginger nut biscuit not so well. There are many Irish-made ice creams you can choose from to fill your sandwich, plenty of delicious locally made versions that celebrate our rich and wonderful dairy history. Ice Cream Sandwich recipe by:Michelle Darmody There are many Irish-made ice creams you can choose from to fill your sandwich, plenty of delicious locally made versions that celebrate our rich and wonderful dairy history. Servings 12 Preparation Time 20 mins Cooking Time 12 mins Total Time 32 mins Course Dessert Ingredients 120g butter, soft 115g golden caster sugar 1 tsp baking powder 50g cocoa powder 240g flour 1 egg, lightly beaten 2 tbsp Golden Syrup 540g vanilla ice cream, soft Method Beat the butter and sugar until pale in colour. Sieve the baking powder, cocoa powder and flour together. Add the egg and |Golden Syrup to the butter mixture and combine. Stir in the flour mixture until it is also combined. Bring the dough together with your hands until smooth. Wrap in parchment and place into the fridge to firm up for an hour. Line two large flat baking trays with parchment. Preheat your oven to 180 °C/gas mark 4. Roll the dough to about 2 mm in thickness and cut it into rectangles about 8cm x 4.5cm in size. You should get about 24 biscuits. Place the biscuits onto the prepared trays. Bake in the center of your oven for 12 minutes. Baker's Tips: You can use a hot spoon to measure out the Golden Syrup; it is so viscous it can be difficult to weigh or measure otherwise. You can put the dough into the freezer or fridge if it gets too soft during rolling. Rolling it while soft will be very messy. Adding a little sprinkling of flour onto your rolling pin with help with the rolling. Leave some space between each biscuit on tray as they will expand as they heat up during baking. It may not need saying, but the biscuits will have to cool completely before making the sandwiches. Leave the biscuits to cool on the baking tray a little longer than you would other biscuits because they are soft when they are still warm. Once cooled place them onto a wire rack to cool completely. You can shape the ice cream around the edge of your biscuit for the neatest result, going around the biscuit with a warm knife can help with this. You can place the ice cream sandwiches on a baking tray and pop them back in the freezer to harden up before serving. This is advisable if it has taken a while to make them and the ice cream has got very soft. If the sandwiches are for an outdoor party or to be served later, you can wrap each one in a square of baking parchment for ease of transporting. This can also be helpful because once wrapped in parchment the sandwiches can be placed into the freezer for storage. They will last a few weeks in the freezer. If you are popping them into a zip-loc bag, squeeze out as much of the air as possible to prevent freezer burn or a build-up of excess ice. The biscuits will keep for a week in an airtight container before you make the sandwiches. Three delicious variations Mint chocolate chip Mint chocolate chip ice cream is a delicious addition instead of the vanilla ice cream. To be extra-decadent you can pour some melted (but slightly cooled) chocolate over the top of the sandwiches. Keep the prepared sandwiches on a tray in the freezer as the chocolate is cooling down, it will still need to be somewhat hot to be pouring texture. Remove the mint choc chip sandwiches from the freezer and drizzle the chocolate on top. Place the tray back into the freezer quite quickly and allow the chocolate to firm up before serving. Raspberry sorbet Raspberry and chocolate work very well together and you can make these sandwiches with a rich raspberry sorbet. I particularly like the version made by Murphy's Ice Cream; it works great for this recipe. You can sprinkle a few chopped raspberries on top of the sorbet before adding the top biscuit if you like. Neapolitan ice cream sandwich Neapolitan is a classic paring of colours and flavours. While ice cream sandwiches are said to have first been invented on the streets on New York for hurried workers on-the-go, to me they are synonymous with Italy, and this is a combination invented by Italian immigrants to the United States. You will need three different ice creams chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Freeze these in rectangle shapes so you can cut the ice cream blocks to fit the biscuits. Add three layers into each sandwich. Read More
The Guardian
28-01-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Biscuits, gummies and seaweed: the Tate & Lyle boss who's moved on from sugar
A plate of Rich Tea biscuits is prominently placed in the centre of the table as Tate & Lyle chief executive Nick Hampton sits down at its swish London headquarters. His 104-year-old company's name may be synonymous with the sugar – and Golden Syrup – found on supermarket shelves, but Hampton has had a different part to play in creating one of the nation's favourite dunkers. Tate & Lyle creates a plethora of ingredients which offer an alternative to that sweet stuff – including extra fibre and sugar replacement in the biscuits. Hampton's business has existed in its current form since 2010, when its sugar arm – now known as Tate & Lyle Sugars – was sold off to American Sugar Refining for £211m, while his business remained listed on the stock market. In fact, it is the only member of the original FT-30 group of listed companies, created in 1935, still on the London stock market. 'Part of the reason for that is nothing we do today we did more than 30 years ago,' says Hampton of the business, which was formed in 1921 from a merger of two rival sugar refiners. Its origins stretch back even further, to a sugar refiner on Liverpool docks in 1859. Hampton, a slick executive who spent more than nine years at PepsiCo after a stint at management consultancy Monitor, has been at the helm for nearly seven years. He is continuing to transform the business to provide alternatives to sugar, which is being taxed and blamed in part for the UK's obesity crisis. The group sources raw foodstuffs from around the world, and creates ingredients designed to offer crunch or creaminess, add fibre, or a give a sweet taste to foodstuffs without the attendant calories. They originate from the likes of corn, tapioca, seaweed, stevia leaf and citrus peel. The group's low- and no-calorie sweeteners and fibre additives have helped remove more than 9m tonnes of sugar from people's diets since 2020, equivalent to 36 trillion calories, he says. Tate & Lyle is reformulating gummies – so children can be persuaded to take vitamins without adding sugar or gelatin – and helping make dairy-free ice-cream and crunchy, healthier biscuits. Aside from the work on Rich Tea, the group has helped reinvent McVitie's digestive biscuits and – less successfully – produce a low-sugar version of Cadbury's Dairy Milk, as well as many more projects it is shy about revealing. Tate & Lyle describes itself as an expert in sweetening, fortification and 'mouthfeel' – a rather off-putting word for what makes up over half the group's business, which is making things seem crunchy or creamy without high-calorie ingredients. Hampton has been busy since taking charge. He sold off a controlling stake in its US-based commercial sweeteners division in a $1.3bn deal in 2021, and last year acquired CP Kelco, a US producer of pectin and speciality gums, for $1.8bn. The blockbuster deal made Tate & Lyle one of the few listed British firms to acquire an American business, rather than accept a takeover from a buyer across the Atlantic. 'We've streamlined it down to a much simpler business focused in where food is going to grow,' says Hampton. 'We now need to execute on that strategy with real conviction and deliver on the growth potential.' Despite his efforts, Tate & Lyle's share price is loitering not far from the level it was at when Hampton took the reins, prompting rumours of an opportunistic bid from US private equity firm Advent late last year. A firm bid for the company – which is valued at £2.8bn – has not materialised but Hampton says the talk was 'a sign of the potential the business has', which makes him 'very determined to unlock the value' in Tate & Lyle. The share price remains depressed as investors wonder if the company may yet be flogging ingredients that are falling out of fashion, despite the rise of weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy. Meanwhile, concerns have been raised about ultra-processed foods – found in everything from breakfast cereals to ready meals and containing a long list of unusual ingredients, linking them to poor health. Hampton gives the idea short shrift. 'The concern about ultra-processed food and its labelling is an opportunity for us, because the issue with lots of ultra-processed food is its nutritional content. It tends to be high in sugar and fat and things that maybe don't create balancing diets.' He says consumers may want a 'clean label' but their priority is more nutritious, tasty and affordable food, with concerns about unusual ingredients further down the list. Tate & Lyle's entire portfolio of ingredients stems from plants, meaning securing supplies in the face of the climate crisis and geopolitical stresses is far from guaranteed. Two years ago, for example, production of the particular type of corn it requires was down 30% in Europe, so supplies had to be shipped in from the US. Meanwhile, production of stevia in China, once Tate & Lyle's only source of the sweetening leaf, was hit by flooding. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion Now, given a combination of potential US tariffs on Chinese goods under the Trump presidency and the need for climate resilience, it is hunting for multiple locations to source and manufacture goods to manage potential shifts in trade, he says. It has signed an agreement to source stevia from Latin America that will be processed in the US. Regarding Trump, Hampton says the group is aiming to 'maintain that flexibility in the supply chain as things evolve'. 'We saw that in 2016 … there was a similar kind of challenge, and we navigated that pretty well.' Despite its London listing, Tate & Lyle is hardly a British company. None of its innovation labs are in the UK, and just 350 of its 3,300 staff worldwide are British-based – at its head office and a facility making powdered food stabiliser in Mold, north Wales. Hampton says the company is committed to remaining in the UK: 'We want our innovation centres to be close to where our customers are as food is inherently regional in nature, because of different tastes and regulatory environments.' While the deal to sell the sugar business was 15 years ago, the Tate & Lyle name has historic associations with the slave trade on which the sugar industry was once based. Founders Henry Tate and Abram Lyle were just boys when the Slavery Abolition Act was passed but it is thought likely their business did have links to the trade. Hampton says he considered changing Tate & Lyle's name after the CP Kelco deal, but did not want to lose the brand recognition outside the UK with clients and its history of improving nutrition. 'There's a huge amount of pride in the heritage of the business,' he adds. 'The name is really powerful for us and talks about the future our business, not the past. It's probably only in the UK where there's that sense of legacy on the shelves.' Age 57Family Married, three grown-up daughters, two Reading School; MA in chemistry at St John's College, Fixed pay of £848,000, plus variable pay of £ holiday advice he's been given 'Three values instilled by my parents. (1) Treat others as you'd like to be treated; (2) whatever you choose to devote your energy to, give it your best; (3) put family first.'Biggest regret 'Probably struggling consistently to put the family first.'Phrases he overuses 'There are three things …'How he relaxes 'Three things! (1) Exercise - I'm an obsessive runner and have recently discovered pilates; (2) playing (only golf now) and watching sport; (3) family – happily, we still see a lot of the girls.'
