Rainbow Tri-Colour Ice Cream

Vanilla pod does double duty across all three layers: the seeds go into the egg mixture for flavour, but the empty pod gets infused into the hot milk and cream first — that's where most of the aroma actually lives, in the oils along the inside of the pod, not just the little black specks. If you've only got vanilla extract, use it, but add it after the custard is made and off the heat; boiling it off in the milk step wastes the alcohol-carried aroma before it has a chance to do anything.

The ratio across all three bases is roughly the same: equal-ish parts milk to cream (with cream dominating two to one), a handful of yolks, sugar, heated and thickened the same way. That consistency isn't fussiness — it means all three layers set to the same texture and slice cleanly together instead of one being icier or softer than its neighbours. If you want to swap one cream for something lighter, match the fat content roughly or your "lightened" layer will be the one that won't hold a clean edge on the knife.

Dark chocolate in the first layer isn't melted separately and folded in — it's chopped fine and the hot custard is poured straight over it, then blended. That order matters: the custard is hot enough to melt the chocolate on contact, and blending emulsifies the cocoa butter into the custard rather than leaving it as a separate fatty layer that would set hard and snap instead of scooping. Use chocolate with no added milk solids messing up the ratio — a plain dark bar, 70% or so is standard, though cheaper cocoa-heavy cooking chocolate works if your eater isn't fussy about floral notes.

Strawberries get cooked down with sugar and the spent vanilla pod before they're puréed and sieved — the cooking isn't about "developing flavour" in some vague sense, it's about driving off water so the purée is concentrated instead of diluting your custard into something that won't freeze properly (sugar and water content are what control ice crystal size here — too much free water and you get a grainy, icy layer instead of a smooth one). The sieving removes the seeds, which otherwise sit gritty between your teeth — small defect, but it's the difference between "shop-bought" and "made by someone who shortcut a step."

On equipment: you need an ice cream maker here, there's no faking three separate custards into smooth ice cream by hand-whisking in the freezer for a dessert with this structure — a domestic hob and a stick blender will get you through the custard-making fine, but the churn itself genuinely needs the machine's constant scraping and freezing action. The springform tin is doing the job a dessert ring would do in a professional kitchen — line the base with parchment so the finished torte actually comes out instead of staying married to the tin, and when you unmould it, run a hot cloth round the outside rather than forcing the clasp, because cold ice cream cracks before it releases.

Each freezing stage listed — the hour of chilling, the two hours per layer — is a lower bound, not a target to race. A London kitchen in winter and the same kitchen in a July heatwave are not the same freezer-adjacent environment; if your layer still gives under light finger pressure, it's not ready for the next pour, whatever the clock says.