An ice-cream parlour is offering bizarre festive recipes this Christmas including PIGS-IN-BLANKET and BRUSSELS SPROUTS.
Customers at Fabio’s Gelato are being served up to 24 “strange” and “wacky” combinations of ice-cream and sorbets which are around for a limited time.
Owners Fabio, 34, and wife Hannah Vincenti, 33 have been running the business for four years and have already made over 400 unique flavours so far.
The couple say the Pigs-in-Blanket recipe, which includes sausage, bacon, vanilla ice-cream and maple syrup, was originally inspired by their Christmas Brussels Sprouts recipe.
Fabio, from Hitchin, Hertfordshire., said: “The pigs-in-blanket recipe tastes like a breakfast.
“You get sweet from the ice-cream and then get a smokey taste from the bacon and then you get the sweet again from the syrup taste.
“It’s like when you get Bacon and maple syrup on pancakes but it is just colder.”
Other Christmas recipes include mince pie, ginger bread, and chocolate orange.
He adds: “People are so intrigued by the mince pie one, even people who don’t like mince pies like the ice cream flavour because it isn’t dry”.
The ice-cream parlour, in Hitchen, Herts., which the couple say Arsenal midfielder Wilshere regularly visits, has managed to create a reputation for not being your “regular” ice-cream parlour.
The parlour has previously offered guests ice-cream in flavours of McDonald’s Big Mac meal, Chocolate and Marmite, Guinness, Kopparberg cider and blue cheese.
Fabio said: “We like to cause a reaction – and we do try and make them taste nice and make it edible.
“It pushes your brain into another area where you think it is going to taste not very nice but it surprises you.
“Like we made a chocolate and Marmite flavour and we have had to bring that back by popular demand because people just loved it so much.
“The wacky flavours come and go very quickly here – they are limited edition but if there is demand for it, we can bring it back.
“We have so many recipes, our goal from day one was to offer 20 different flavours at one time”.
One scoop of the ice-cream will cost customers £2.70 but Fabio says guests have a chance to taste the recipe before they buy.
Fabio adds: “We didn’t want to just be a regular ice-cream place that offers just six flavours because we knew people would get bored”.
Fabio and Hannah fell in love with Gelato after a family holiday to Rome, and decided to pursue their love for ice-cream by attending a course at Reading University in 2013.
by Yasmin Harisha