This creamy dessert is packed with crispy rice treats, popping candy and a cocoa miso caramel sauce.

How could I resist the opportunity to come up with a space-themed recipe this week, with all this talk of moon landings?

My culinary mind took me to so many places. I could have made my own 'Mars' bars with a galaxy mirror glaze (too complicated for the average home cook so I binned it). Then I toyed with a Mars cake, with a ravishing red caramel filling…but I hate using too many food colours in cooking.

In a moment of madness/genius I thought 'why not carve the moon out of ice cream?'.

And that leads us to this frozen cake, which takes a while to make, but has a pretty simple method.

Vanilla ice cream is swirled with a miso cocoa caramel, which brings an interesting sweet and salty bite to the dessert. Sound weird? Trust me, it works. The earthy salinity of the miso is a bit more mysterious and smoky than flaked salt. I first tried the combination last year at The Chocolate Line in Bruges where the, quite frankly, wacky mixtures sounded off-the-wall, but tasted divine (although I wasn't up for tasting the cannabis ganache). Underneath this creation is a big fat wedge of puffed rice treat, all gooey with Mars bars and butter, and with the extra surprise of a sprinkling of popping candy.

It would be a pretty cool project to make with children/grandchildren over the holidays…but it doesn't have to be moon-shaped. You could set it into a loaf tin, square tin or deep round cake tin and instead of cutting out craters, could use melted coloured chocolate or a paintbrush dipped in colouring to decorate it with any pattern you like!

Frozen moon cake

(serves 8-10)

Ingredients

2lts vanilla or toffee ice cream

For the miso cocoa fudge sauce:

100g golden caster sugar

Splash water

25g unsalted butter

150ml single cream

1-1.5tsps brown rice miso paste

1tbsp cocoa

For the base:

4 Mars bars (from a multipack - 39.4g each)

50g unsalted butter

100g puffed rice cereal

1 small pack popping candy (optional)

1 handful lightly crushed salted peanuts (optional)

To finish: 400g melted white chocolate at room temperature, silver/pearl edible food dust

Method

Clean and dry a thin 2 pint bowl (metal is best) and line with clingfilm. For the sauce place the sugar and a splash of water in a small saucepan on a low heat and simmer gently until all the sugar has dissolved. Take off the heat and add the butter and cream (be careful as it might spit at you). Return to the heat and cook on low, stirring all the time until the sauce thickens to just coat the spoon. Sift in the cocoa and add the miso paste - 1tsp at first but add a bit more if you like it saltier. Decant the sauce into a bowl and allow to cool.

While the sauce cools make the base. Chop the Mars bars and melt slowly with the butter in a pan or in a bowl in the microwave. Stir in the rice cereal, popping candy and peanuts and allow to come to room temperature.

Mash the ice cream in a large bowl and layer it into your prepared metal bowl, drizzling the cooled sauce between spoonfuls of ice cream so it's all swirled together. Press the rice cereal mix on top to seal in an even layer and pop back in the freezer for a couple of hours.

Remove from the freezer, turn out onto a plate, remove the clingfilm and take out 'craters' from the ice cream using a scoop or spoon. Return to the freezer for another hour.

Now pour all over with the melted, room temperature white chocolate, scooping excess out of the craters with a spoon. Return to the freezer until you're ready to serve. Before serving dust with sparkly edible dust.