Orange shortcake with ice cream

I had to come up with a dessert recipe on the fly. We had some shortcake cups and some vanilla ice cream with strawberry. A quick check of the pantry revealed a can of mandarin oranges as well. That was enough to come up with something. I made the ice cream last week. I just made the standard French vanilla ice cream and I added chunks of diced strawberry right at the end of the stirring time. Rather than get a strawberry ice cream it was more of a vanilla ice cream with frozen strawberry chunks. It sounds weird, but it was like having little strawberry candies in a vanilla ice cream. I took the mandarin oranges out of the can and put the syrup in a sauce pan. I added some vanilla-scented sugar, a splash of vanilla, a dash of cinnamon and a healthy amount of dark rum. This mixture reduced down until it was a very thick syrup. I put a layer of the mandarin oranges in the shortcake cup and topped it with a scoop of ice cream. I drizzled the hot syrup over the ice cream and put the last few mandarin orange segments on top. The hot syrup melted some of the ice cream and the mixture soaked into the shortcake. Yummy to the highest power. Lupe liked it.

From The Hollow Leg Diner - images