Christmas Day is generally a sweltering occasion at Gundowring, so Ice Cream Plum Puddings have long been a Crooke Family tradition.

For the past 38 years Sarah and Stephen have been making these puddings for the family, soaking the fruit, roasting the almonds and steeping the chestnuts and vanilla bean in milk collected from their cows. Their recipe comes from the south of France, where chestnuts are a staple of the region. While working as cooks for a family in Cannes in 1974, Sarah stumbled upon a small ice cream churn when shopping for supplies in the backstreets of Nice, and it is here that their ice cream career began.