ginger's comfort emporium and thoughts on food for 'grown-ups'

king's cross ice cream festival

i have often heard of food and flavours being described as ‘for grown-ups’. i have on occasion used the description myself but it never ceases to puzzle me. mostly because when i was growing up i liked a lot of foods that most children didn’t. i ate stuffed bitter gourds gently steamed in a masala of lentils or minced meat. i loved vegetables such as courgettes, turnips and squash and i loved hummus only when it had the real assertive tahina flavour. i ate the stuff with a fork rather than pita when i was around eight years old. so you can understand why i find this description a little confusing. 

but on saturday, after queuing for an incredible forty-six minutes at ginger’s comfort emporium at the king's cross ice cream festival i finally realised that there are foods that are for grown-ups only. ginger’s comfort emporium hits the nail on the head when she describes her iced confections as being for ‘grown-ups’. her ice-cream van is colourful and quirky. it looks like a confection itself, as its body is pastel pink and plum brown with gold writing. i had a really hard time choosing my flavours as my hubby had abandoned me and gone home. 

o observing the milking apparatus

in the end i had to pair together two absolutely incongruous flavours only to feed my curiosity (and greed)! i picked the marmalade and toast and hazelnut, white truffle and chocolate stracciatella. it would have been sensible to marry the marmalade and toast with the orange blossom sorbet, as the notes of orange would have tied the two together. but its not everyday that one gets to have truffle ice cream. its hard to be adult when you have such interesting choices. 

hazelnut, white truffle and chocolate stracciatella
and marmalade and toast

the hazelnut, white truffle and chocolate stracciatella was nothing like i had imagined. it was heavy on texture since the nuts were chopped till grainy. the ice cream that held the stracciatella (long slivers of chocolate) was creamy and heavy on truffle flavour. it was a savoury-sweet confection. the marmalade and toast had a real kick. it was as if over generous spoonfuls of bitter marmalade had been folded into clotted cream and finished with crunchy brown toast. it was every bit marmalade and toast in a cold incarnation. 

now, something needs to be done to make ginger’s comfort emporium more readily accessible to londoner’s. any ideas? perhaps we should start a petition!