Walnut Banana Ice-Cream Cake

My mum's birthday was 2 weeks ago, we did'nt celebrate for her on her actual day as she was having bad cough, sore-throat and running nose. She had consulted the chinese sinsen and was advised to stop consuming egg, chicken, seafood, cold food etc. so she can't eat most of the food, she can't eat cake (I will utterly disappointed if she can't consume the cake I make for her :P)and she was feeling sleepy throughout the day.

We waited and waited and waited, finally she was fully recovered! Yeh! We quickly set a date for lunch and after some researched and discussion, we decided to have dim sum at Royal China, Raffles Hotel.

Due to it was last day of CNY, the restaurant didn't serve full range of dim sum :( The menu only had 12 types of dim sum, we almost wanted to ask the waitress to serve all but luckily I read the menu again and finally excluded 3 items as we dun really consume them. On top of that, we ordered one beijing duck, glutinous rice and noodle.

The serving was so fast, in a few blink of eyes, all the dim sum were served on our table. Luckily the dim sum were served fast, if not we wouldn't know we had over ordered. Thus, we cancelled the rice and noodle and still, we can't even finished the duck that had to packet back home.
Sorry no photo to post as we were too busy eating due to the speed serving of food and I still need to serve my little princess.

Now back to the birthday cake. My mum not really fancy on cakes but she do likes ice-cream especially potong ice-cream and her favourite flavour is red bean. I decided to make her a ice-cream cake so after flipped through my recipes and short-listed 2 flavours - red bean and walnut banana. My sis suggested the latter since the combination seem interesting and we have not seen this flavour of ice-cream in supermarket.


As I saw there were still some riped del monte bananas at home and I had the rest of ingredients except dairy whipping cream, so I went to NTUC on thursday night to get it but no stock available. And worst, I can't find the bananas in my house when I reached home, my MIL got my helper to fry banana fritter :(.
I got dear husband to send me to another supermarket before fetching dear daughter from her enrichment class to buy bananas and dairy whipping cream. I have no luck again, the bananas were so green and there is no dairy whipping cream either. Luckily, I managed to find the ripe bananas in the fruit store (although is not my choice of del monte bananas but better than none) during my lunch next day and also bought the dairy whipping cream in another NTUC when I was on the way back home.


The freezer is over stock by MIL, thus the ice-cream was not able to be very harden. I had concerned to transport the ice-cream cake to the restaurant due to the recent hot weather and my cooler bag is not big enough to put in the cake. So I had no choice to use dear husband ice box and put in ice pads to create cooling environment in the ice box for the ice-cream. Once reached the resturant, I hurried the waitress to put the cake in the freezer. Still then, when the cake was served out for candle blowing until cake cutting, it was a bit melted.

I still have some ripe bananas left after the ice-cream making so I planned to bake banana cake. However, my SIL brought a banana cake when she came for dinner that she had baked as she had riped bananas at home too.
After tasted the cake, my conclusion is the banana cake recipe that I am using still taste better :)

Recipe adapted from Yummy Cold Desserts Made Easy 冷冻甜品 by Kelly Tang.

Ingredients: (for 7" cake ring and 1 small container)
Crust:
100g marie + diagestive biscuits (crush finely with rolling pin)
40g melted butter

Mix the marie & diagestive biscuit crumbs with the melted butter. Press the mixture firmly onto the bottom of the round cake mould and chill in the fridge for 2 hours.

Ice-cream:
A
2 egg yolks
100g castor sugar (I reduced to 90g)
2 ripe bananas, mashed (I increased to 4 as the size of the bananas I used is smaller than del monte which I assumed most bananas recipe will use del monte)

B
250g dairy whipping cream

C
200g evaporated milk

D
100g toasted chopped walnut (I just used rolling pin to crush the walnuts)

Method:
1. Beat A until sugar has dissolved and pale.
2. Bring B to boil, add in A mixture and stir well. Remove from heat and leave to cool.
3. Add in C to mix well. Pour mixture into a container and freeze overnight.
4. Remove ice-cream from freezer and whisk until smooth and creamy. Mix in D and pour into the chilled biscuit base and return to freezer to freeze until firm or overnight.

Verdict?
I had received positive feedback on the ice cream cake, most of my family asked for 2nd serving although mum and dear husband said the ice-cream is a bit on sweet side. I brought the small container of ice-cream to office, all colleagues that tasted said very yummy, there is one colleague suggested that I should use lesser bananas in future as the bananas was over power (well, sometimes not really the more the merrier :P).
This ice-cream full of the fragant of bananas and walnut and both complement each other so well. The ice-cream is a bit sweet for me probably due to the bananas, and the ice-cream is more icy texture than what I had expected of the creamy texture. I will try other recipes from the same book soon to check whether all are icy texture and also will find out how to make it creamy texture. And I still prefer to use del monte bananas than other type of bananas.