Curtis Stone's Oh-so-delicious mango caramel ice-cream cake

This mango ice-cream cake is the ultimate ending to any Christmas feast. You're gonna absolutely love it. There's layers of mango-caramel sauce with macadamia-vanilla ice-cream and a special chocolatey base. This cake, well, it takes the cake as far as festive desserts go. You're gonna absolutely love it. Let me show you how you make it. First of all, we're gonna make a caramel. So let me take my pan over here. All you need is some sugar and some water. You stir it over low heat until the sugar's dissolved. Now here's the important part. Stop stirring. You don't want any undissolved sugar crystals to get in your liquid or the caramel will crystallise and go grainy. No good. That's not what you want. To dissolve any crystals that might form, just brush it down the side of the pan with just a little bit of a wet pastry brush. OK, into my blender I take some chopped-up mango... ..a little lime juice... ..some sugar and just a little water. Pop that in and then we blend it. Now that's well blended, add the cream and bring it to a simmer. Now, when your caramel has turned nice and golden brown and you can see that's really bubbling away now and there's even a little bit of smoke just coming off the pan, then I combine my mango puree and you'll see that ferocious kind of caramel as it starts to bubble up. Give it a stir. But this is looking just right. Set aside three-quarters of a cup of the mixture to cool and then place the rest in the fridge to serve with the cake. So time to caramelise the macadamia nuts. A third of a cup of sugar. You just pop that into a pan that's over a medium heat and what you're gonna see is that sugar is gonna just slowly start to melt and it's gonna slowly start to turn brown. Once that's beautiful and golden brown, what you do is add a little butter. Go ahead and throw your warmed macadamia nuts into the pan. And here I've got a pre-greased tray. So just with a little butter, just grease the tray and then just go ahead and I kind of like to just pop them onto the tray... (LAUGHS) But you've gotta move pretty fast 'cause they will start sticking together. Get a couple of spoons or even a fork and a spoon or something like that and you can go in there and you can start to break these away from each other so they're all sort of individual. So once they're all relatively well separated, we'll sit them to the side and time to make the base. It's a really simple recipe. A little bit of oil, right? I'm gonna pop that into the bowl of a double boiler. So there's some simmering water underneath there. And then just a little bit of white chocolate and the oil actually will help the white chocolate to stay quite fluid, if you will. In fact, you don't even need it to be boiling. I'm gonna turn that water off because the residual heat will be more than enough. You see, it's melting almost straightaway. Once your chocolate and oil is melting, get some digestive biscuits, chuck those in. Effectively, once you've sort of had that going for a moment and it sort of resembles sand, that's the sort of texture you're looking for. Then you go ahead and pick up your white chocolate. Then you can go ahead and add that. Then what we do is back into the bowl where the chocolate actually was. Next what I do - take my pre-greased pans, then you go ahead and get your crumb and basically just toss that in. You can give it a bit of a shake to get it pretty even. And then - this is a little trick I've got - grab yourself a glass. Sort of starting in the middle, you kind of start to push it down, working around your biscuit crumb to the outside 'cause effectively you want this to sort of line some of the walls of the cake as well as the base. That's it. We pop this in the freezer. We let it set for about an hour or so. It's time to assemble the ice-cream cake. So I've got some beautiful vanilla ice-cream and it's just at that temperature... See how it's sort of beautiful and stringy? That's how you want it. Then what I'm gonna do is take about half of these gorgeous macadamia nuts that we've caramelised and just throw those guys in and then just fold that through the ice-cream like so. And then what I do is basically put a layer of the ice-cream straight into the base of the cake. Then what I do is I kind of push the ice-cream into the base of the cake like that, just working it around. You take the mango caramel that we made earlier and I'm gonna just go ahead and pour that all over. Then layer up that ice-cream as well. Best if you work from the outside in, if that makes any sense. So go from the rim of the tin and then allow it to sort of fall into the ice-cream cake like that so you're not squashing the caramel out as you add more of that ice-cream. I take a little bit more of the mango caramel. And just sort of swirl it around the top. Finish it off with all of that ice-cream and then we're gonna get it into the freezer as fast as we can so that we can refreeze it. Lastly, before it goes back in the freezer, I'm just gonna put some nice, big dollops of that beautiful caramel and then it goes straight back into the freezer and it sets for 24 hours. So here's one that's been set beautifully for about 24 hours. It's really quite firm, which is exactly how you want it, 'cause now our job is to de-mould the ice-cream cake. Here's a little secret. I've got some red hot water straight out of the kettle. Grab yourself a tea towel. Dunk it in, right, so you've got a nice steamy cloth and then what I like to do - wrap that around the outside of my cake tin. So it's gonna just ever so gently penetrate through that cake tin and it's gonna help to release the sides. Open up the clasp. There you go. Next, using just a little pallet knife or an offset pallet knife, just go in on the side there. And now it's time to decorate it. So I've just got some nicely sliced mango here. Really, really simple, actually. So when I put this down, I just kind of ever so gently curve the fruit. Lastly, but certainly not least, is our macadamia nuts. I just go ahead and dot those over the top. If you want to serve it with a little bit of extra caramel sauce, you can, but I'm gonna go ahead and just drizzle mine with this beautiful, dark caramel. This is gonna be an absolute show-stopper at your Christmas.