Nigel Slater’s midweek treat: baked apples with fruit mincemeat ice-cream

Set the oven at 200C/gas mark 6. Using a corer, remove the cores from each of 4 large cooking apples or 8 dessert varieties. (The time your apples take to bake will depend on the variety. The quickest to cook will be the big frothy bramley type, the cooking varieties, as they are known.)

Halfway down each fruit, score a line through the skin all the way round each apple. This will allow the flesh to expand while keeping the fruit in one piece.

Place the apples in a baking dish or roasting tin so they are just nudging one another. Bake for about 45 minutes until the flesh is soft right through to the middle (test with a skewer). Allow more time for very large apples, less for smaller ones: dessert apples can take as little as 30 minutes.

Take 500ml of vanilla ice-cream from the freezer and let it soften (just don’t let it melt).

In a small pan, warm 250g of fruit mincemeat until it is almost liquid and starts to bubble, then remove and allow it to cool a little.

Tip the softened ice-cream into a bowl, then spoon in the slightly warm mincemeat. Mix together gently and briefly, just enough for the ice-cream to be marbled with the mincemeat. Place it back in the freezer until the apples are ready.

Once the apples are soft and puffed up, and their skin is lightly scorched, divide them between four bowls, and top with spoonfuls of the mincemeat ice-cream.

• If you can’t get hold of mincemeat or you’re not a fan, this treatment works well with marmalade, too.

Serves 4. Ready in 1 hour.