Making your own ice cream can be tricky, and often requires very specific equipment. That is why I’m such a big fan of semifreddo: “Semifreddo (pronounced [semiˈfredːo], Italian: half cold) is a class of semi-frozen desserts, typically ice-cream cakes, semi-frozencustards, and certain fruit tarts. It has the texture of frozen mousse because it is usually produced by uniting two equal parts of ice cream and whipped cream” (Wikipedia).

I was looking for inspiration for a dessert incorporating limoncello when I came across my peer Caroline’s Blog. She had posted a recipe for limoncello semifreddo, which to me sounded like a win-win. In fact, the dessert turned out to be just that — even though in the end I made it without the lemon sauce/syrup.

The preparation is pretty straight forward: the semifreddo consists of a cream cheese & lemon curd mixture, layered in a cake tin between lemoncello+lemon juice+sugar-soaked lady fingers. For those of you that don’t master the Dutch language, I translated the ingredients:

– zest and juice of 1 lemon
– 2 tbsp fine sugar
– 80 ml limoncello
– 325 g lemon curd (I happened to have 1 jar of home-made lying around, which was just the right amount)
– 250 g cream cheese
– 250 g mascarpone (italian cream cheese)
– approximately 24-30 lady fingers

For the sauce/syrup
– 100 g fine sugar
– 1 lemon, the zest in long thin pieces
– juice of 1 lemon

One week later, I started experimenting, and mixed molten chocolate and sugar with the cream (in stead of lemon curd), and soaked the lady fingers in rum (in stead of limoncello). That is all it took to create another beautiful dessert, and as I’m writing this I start getting even more variation-ideas…