Lucy Corry's Famous Vanilla Ice Cream with Chocolate Sauce and Spicy, Salty Nuts

Photo: Lucy Corry

Serves 8-10

This is creamy, chocolate-y, nutty, spicy heaven – the perfect solution when you need to show up with dessert but lack the time, energy, equipment or creative spark to make something. Part of its success lies in the interactive element (everyone loves being able to customise their own dessert).

Note: Don’t show this recipe to too many people or you’ll be eating it at every barbecue and dinner party you go to from now ‘til next Christmas.

Ingredients

• 300ml cream

• 250g dark chocolate (I use Whitaker’s Dark Ghana 72 or 60 percent cacao), roughly chopped

• 175g honey-roasted peanuts (or other roasted nuts – roasted salted cashews would be extra luxurious)

• A couple of tablespoons of dried chilli flakes

• 2 litres of vanilla ice cream

Method

Heat the cream in a small pot until nearly simmering, then stir in the chopped chocolate. Remove from the heat and stir until smooth. Scrape this delectable goo into a jug and take it to the table with the vanilla ice cream, nuts and chilli flakes (to look like you’ve made more effort, put the nuts and chilli flakes into your fanciest bowls first).

Now comes the fun part: get everyone to help themselves to ice cream, then chocolate sauce, then nuts, then chilli flakes. It can take a bit of delicious practice to get the ratio of ice cream to chocolate sauce to nuts and chilli flakes right, but there's a lot of fun to be had in finding the perfect balance.