Cinnamon

Rating: ****

When I told my uncle Greg I liked cinnamon ice cream, he recommended the recipe in The Perfect Scoop, so I went ahead and used that unaltered. You don't put any ground cinnamon in it, but just steep 10 cinnamon sticks in the milk for an hour. That has the effect not only of making it more expensive, but also leaving it looking like vanilla, rather than cinnamon-colored. But it definitely tastes cinnamony, if you don't look at it too much. I'd be tempted to put in ground cinnamon as well, just to change the color. :-)

I liked it, but it didn't blow me away enough to give it five stars. It may partly be that I'm not preferring the custard style ice creams these days, though. But if you like cinnamon (and I do), it's definitely worth it.

(Made for Princess Bride movie night with Lacey and Cathy.)

Mint Coffee Brownie

Rating: ****

Cheryl made some brownies the other day and very kindly saved some for ice creaming. After extensive debate, we decided on mint coffee ice cream with brownie bits in it. The original idea was to have the mint be throughout the base, the coffee in swirls, and the brownies in discrete bits, so all three flavors would be in distinct modes. That didn't happen.

I need to figure out a proper way to do swirls in ice cream. Cheryl did diagram all the options we considered. We went with option B (which didn't work), separating out some of the cream to mix the coffee into and add later, but it ended up still just mixing evenly throughout. If anyone has tips, let me know. I think maybe we should have mixed coffee into a portion of almost-finished ice cream, then put that back in, but I don't know how well the coffee would have blended (i.e. the granules wouldn't dissolve). That would have been option A or C, depending on the timing.

Anyway, about the recipe itself. The mint part is easiest -- just a tsp of peppermint extract in a sweet cream base. Ben & Jerry's coffee recipe (pg. 66) says to use 3 tbsp of coffee, but we only used about half of that, which I think cooperates better with the mint. Then just crumble in a bunch of the brownies. I'm not the biggest fan of coffee or straight coffee ice cream, but this combination is nice.

Graham Screams

... for ice cream. Ah, I do love ice cream. And I must say that getting an ice cream maker of my own was a life-changing experience.

This blog is a record of ice cream flavors I've made, and any thoughts or tips I came up with in making them. I won't generally type up complete recipes, but I will tell you where to get them, or explain that it's such-and-such a recipe with certain additions, modifications, or whatever. This is all just play and experimentation anyway.

Feel free to share your own ice cream thoughts or flavor suggestions!

Chocolate Reese's Peanut Butter Cup

Rating: ***
From Ben & Jerry's book, page 81. 1 cup of chopped Reese's PB cups takes about 5-6 of them.
It's certainly good, but I'd just as soon have the chocolate peanut butter chocolate chip recipe I did before, and it's not much more work. That's the only reason I rated it relatively low.

Chocolate Ginger

Rating: ****
Ben's chocolate recipe, from the Ben & Jerry's book, pg. 44
+ 1 tbsp of powdered ginger
Diced some candied ginger (~1/4 c.) to add at end.
Didn't seem at first like it would be enough powdered ginger, but it turned out to be plenty.
Used candied ginger that wasn't coated in sugar already. Diced very tiny. Seemed chewier than I remembered.
Texture was a little grainy. Maybe chocolate + milk phase needed to be heated longer? Or maybe it was how the powdered ginger reacted to it?
(This was Rowyn's birthday ice cream.)