As I’ve mentioned before, I very rarely eat cheese. I like it, but rarely buy it because it’s expensive and Brixton doesn’t have many choices to buying small amounts of cheese rather than family sized blocks so I get bored of eating the same kind quite quickly. But the one thing I never tire of is cream cheese. I’ve always got a tub in the fridge because it is delicious and versatile and goes with Ryvita like nobody’s business. Therefore it was inevitable as a cream cream obsessive that I would be lured into trying the new Cadbury’s chocolate and Philadelphia combo pretty much soon as it came out.

And I quite liked it. It made a nice change from Nutella, but I would have liked slightly more lactic tang from it and less flat sugariness, but considering how sweet all processed food is these days, I guess I should be glad there was any type of cheese taste to it at all. I had some on Ryvita (quelle surprise) and liked it with the saltiness, but found it a bit flat with digestive biscuits. I found myself with more leftover than I expected and wondered what to do with it. I thought back to the Veda Bread ice cream I made which was originally made with a cream cheese base and knew exactly what to do with that second impulse purchase tub.

Chocolate Philadelphia Ice Cream (adapted from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop)

• 250ml whole milk (I use Jersey)
• A pinch of salt
• 100g sugar
• 1 tub of chocolate Philadelphia (160g)
• half a large bar of dark chocolate (I used Lindt 70%)
• 500ml double cream
• 5 large egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Heat the milk gently in a pan, adding in the cream and the sugar and dark chocolate and stirring until everything is melted, then add in the chocolate cream cheese and keep stirring until that melts. Make sure the mixture has come back up to heat, but is in no danger of overheating or boiling and then temper the egg yolks by adding a cupful of the chocolate milk mix to them. Mix this in and add the yolks to the pan and stir until the custard thickens enough to coat the back of a spatula. Add in the vanilla extract, cover the bowl and place in the fridge to cool (overnight preferably).

Next day, you should have had the thickest creamiest chocolate custard you can imagine. Churn in your ice cream maker for around 30 minutes or as described in the instructions. (I have a machine, so cannot be sure if you could make this without one. Worth a go though!) Serve when ready.

And marvel at how delicious this is. The extra chocolate adds the slight bitterness and tang the original product needed to be more grown up and you definitely get a different taste to a regular chocolate ice cream from the cream cheese. This is very rich but surprisingly grown up. I definitely preferred it to the cream cheese on its own, thus proving no matter what the question is, ice cream is the answer!