h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One of my best friends in the UK just happens to make the best Icecream I've ever eaten...

A cumbrian sheep and dairy farmer, who's been ekeing out a meagre existance running a lakeland hill farm, had a brainwave a few years ago...

Instead of selling the milk he produced from his dozen or so Ayrshire cattle to the milk marketing board at a pitiful price, he invested in a set of ice-cream makers and turned an old garage into a shop...

Now, the shop just happens to stand in the middle of Buttermere village in the middle of the Lake District, and every single one of the thousands of people who wandeer around the lake in the summer have to walk through his farmyard and thus straight past the front of his shop...

In addition to the fact he's got a captive audience - how many icecreams have you eaten where the people selling it can point out the cows the milk came from less than 12 hours previously?

Aww I'm all nostalgic now! Buttermere Village!

Have you ever tried Brucciani ice cream, Whisky? It's either Barrow (sorry) or Morecambe ice cream - it's absolutely wonderful.

Sounds familiar - I'm not sure some of the ice-cream vans that used to run around Carlisle didn't have that name on them (but there again - my memory's not what it used to be - and _all_ ice-cream vans seemed to have italian names on the side )

(I'll be back in Buttermere in a couple of weeks as well - so I'll be able to report on whether the ice-cream's still as good as ever)

Sounds brill - and good on him for being enterprising .

A local farm shop to us sells the most interesting ice cream I've ever seen. A farmer near Napton-on-the-Hill has a herd of water buffalo (yes, in Warwickshire) and uses their milk to make cheese, yoghurts and ice cream. In order to make flavoured ice cream, he uses the real things rather than artificial flavourings and additives, so it's all natural. Apparently the buffalo milk is also lower in fat and lactose than cow's milk.

We tried some of the banoffee flavoured buffalo milk ice cream, and it was delicious . It had a slightly sharper edge to it than cow's milk, but also tasted richer and creamier. The toffee sauce was lush, and there were nice chunks of real banana in it. It was really worth trying, as it didn't taste anything like as outlandish or weird as we thought it would .

It's a while since I've been back, and I can't remember what other flavours they did now. I do remember they did seasonal ones - at Christmas, they had Christmas pudding flavour ice cream - so I expect the range will have altered a bit.