We were lucky enough to be given vouchers for Lakeland Plastics at Christmas. As the weather has been so bad, we haven’t managed to use them until this week.

So we headed north to Perth and had a mooch around the Lakeland shop there. I’ve always fancied being able to make my own ice-cream so that is what we ended up buying and we’ve been trying it out this week-end.

We started off with the vanilla and then branched out to mint with crushed up Aero mint chocolate added to it. They were both really lovely and I’m looking forward to experimenting with lots of different flavours.

You get a basic recipe book with the machine but I think you can be really adventurous and make it up as you go along. There is a great Italian ice cream shop in St Andrews which has dozens and dozens of different flavours, I think my favourite is the Scottish Tablet one and that should be really easy to replicate.

I’ve got Turkish Delight left over from Christmas too and I think I’ll chop it up and add it to the basic vanilla with some rose-water, that should be lovely.

I hate cheap commercially made ice-cream. To me it is just like sweetened margarine and at least if you make it yourself, you know exactly what is in it.

The bowl of the ice-cream maker has to be in your freezer for about 12 hours before you can use it, but after that it only takes about 20 minutes to make the ice-cream.

So the ice-cream maker has been a great success and I would recommend it to anyone who is thinking about buying one.