Quadruple Chocolate

[This guest post is from my sister Lacey, who recently got her own ice cream maker.]

Rating: *****
Nickname: Pity Party Chocolate

This ice cream was inspired by a Facebook status that my friend Cate posted during the World Cup when her team got knocked out of the running: “No one makes a chocolate ice cream that's chocolaty enough for my pity party.” My natural reaction, of course, was to remedy that situation, so I set out to make an ice cream chocolaty enough. Here’s what I came up with:

For the base (Chocolate 1) I used Jerry’s Chocolate Ice Cream recipe from Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book. For the cocoa I used a combination of Scharffenberger organic unsweetened cocoa and Hershey’s Special Dark, which made for an extremely dark color and rich chocolate flavor.

Chocolate 2 was about half of an 8x8 pan’s worth of gooey brownie chunks. I used the recipe for Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies from Luscious Chocolate Desserts by Lori Longbotham — the whole recipe calls for only 1/4 cup of flour! I undercooked them slightly and used pieces from the middle for maximum gooey goodness factor.

Chocolate 3 was about 1/3 cup of shaven bittersweet chocolate – I used Scharffenberger 70% cacao baking chocolate.

Chocolate 4 was a chocolate syrup made from 2/3 cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips, melted in a double boiler, then mixed with 1/4 cup cream, cooled somewhat so that it wouldn’t melt the ice cream but that it would still pour from the pan.

I churned the base ice cream until it was basically ready, then added in the brownie chunks and shaven chocolate at the end to get them mixed in. Then I alternated dollops of ice cream with glops and drizzles of chocolate syrup as I transferred it to the freezing container.

The result was phenomenal, if I do say so myself. This ice cream has lots of different chocolate flavors and textures, but beware – it’s extremely rich! I can only manage one scoop in a sitting, which is probably just as well.

The 5-star rating is based on the following individual ratings and comments:

Kirsty: 5 out of 5
Robbie: 4.5 out of 5 (compared to B&J’s Phish Food)
Hugo: 4 out of 5 (for a man who says he doesn’t like chocolate ice cream, that’s pretty high. On a scale of only chocolate ice creams, he gave it a 5)
Me: 5 out of 5 (“Wow.”)
Cate: 5.5 out of 5 (“When I said I wanted chocolate ice cream, this is exactly what I had in mind.” And “This is seriously the best ice cream I have ever tasted.”)
Victor: 15 out of 10 (“5.5 out of 5? Are you kidding me? 15 out of 10!”)
Natalia: no specific rating, but it ended up all over her face in her eagerness to scarf it up, which is about as good as you can ask for from a 19 month-old. :)