Wild Fig ice creams

When guests come to dinner, we like to serve up local food. Today it was a trip to the Wild Fig Café for some ice cream. Wild Fig Farm is located in Peterson-Super-Ely, in a dairy farm-rich area of the Vale of Glamorgan. In a car, you leave the village, heading away from Cardiff, and take the right turn up Groes Faen Road. The Farm Shop and Pick-Your-Own is a right turn a little way along this road. At the end of the track is the café and shop. There are also poly-tunnels for P.Y.O. strawberries and chickens (and plenty of eggs for sale).

Today, the shop was selling a full range of Wild Fig ice creams, in small (£1.80) and large (500g, £4.15) tubs and in cones from the counter: Vanilla, Blueberry, Strawberry, Chocolate Brownie, Chocolate, Cherry and Amaretto, Walnut and Maple, Crème Brulée, Gooseberry, Fig Compote and their signature flavour of Fig and Marsala. I particularly enjoyed the Walnut and Maple in a cone today. We bought big tubs of Strawberry and Blueberry to construct a pudding with meringue nests and fresh fruit from our garden.

At the back of the distinctively-purple-branded café you can look through a glass observation window into the ice cream making parlour, with its gleaming steel equipment. The ice cream is made using milk and double cream from the black and white pedigree cows at Ty Tanglwyst Dairy in Pyle, Bridgend.

The café sells a full range of coffee and teas, home-made cakes, and deli-style lunches. The shop also sells a range of home-made jams and pickles, local honey, Vale of Glamorgan bottled ales, local ciders, pasta and a range of other deli items.

You can buy Wild Fig ice creams during show intervals at the Wales Millennium Centre (vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, stem ginger and wild fig). I usually go for the ginger, but they are all delicious. Hint: regular concert-goers would like to see even more flavours for sale at the WMC!

Wild Fig Farm:
http://www.wildfigfarm.co.uk/
Ty Tanglwyst Dairy:
http://www.tytanglwystdairy.com/home.htm



Note added July 2012:
The Café and P.Y.O. have now closed at the farm, although Wild Fig Ice Creams are still widely available in restaurants, theatres and at events in the Cardiff area.