Strawberry Brownie

Rating: ****

I made this ice cream for Dad's birthday. He had requested strawberry, but he also likes things with chocolate in them, like mint chip and moose tracks, so I thought this would be a fun combo.

The strawberry part is straight out of Ben & Jerry's, page 54. Then Cheryl made some brownies and I put pieces in shortly before the ice cream was done. I ought to have measured how much I used, but I think it was only around the amount of two generously-sized brownies. I tried to use mostly edge pieces, though, since they were a bit more solid and less likely to break into crumbs. It's still worth using fairly big chunks, though. :-)

Coconut Ginger

Rating: ****
Nickname: "Flying Down to Rio"

For the coconut base, I decided to take Ben & Jerry's sweet cream base #1 and then roughly substitute coconut milk for the cream. ("Roughly," because a 14-oz can of coconut milk is about 1 2/3 cups, and then I just used milk to finish off the necessary 3 cups of "dairy.")

In contrast, I noticed later that B&J actually have a coconut recipe in the book, but they make the whole sweet cream base plus the coconut milk. I assume that'd make it a bit less strongly coconuty and less sweet. But I like how this version turned out.

The coconut flakes add texture, but aren't necessary for flavor. For ginger, we used uncrystalized Buderim ginger, diced up tiny. (If they're too big, they're too chewy.)

Here's the recipe:

2 eggs
3/4 c. sugar
1 14-oz can of coconut milk
1 1/3 c. milk
1/4 c. coconut flakes
1/4 c. (generous) diced ginger

Whisk the first four ingredients together and put in the ice cream maker. Add the last two towards the end, when it's thickening up.

[About the nickname: "Flying Down to Rio" was the first Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers film, so it had ginger in it, and I assume there are coconuts grown in Rio de Janeiro. Best I could do on this one, anyway. :-) ]

Persimmon and Pepper

Rating: ***
Nickname: "Persimmon to Drool"

This recipe from Epicurious uses crushed black pepper, boiled up in some sugar water. Along with a bunch of fresh persimmons, there's only about a cup of actual cream. I was worried it would turn out a bit icy, but it's actually okay. It has a slightly more gooey-fruity texture to it than regular ice cream, though. I think the peppery bits are kind of fun, but they can be a bit strong if you get too much at once.

We made this recipe mostly as written, but with an extra 1/4 c. of sugar because it didn't seem very sweet, and an extra persimmon just for the heck of it. Most fruit recipes I've done involve mashing the fruit up with some extra sugar first, but this one didn't.

Anyway, it was good, though I'm also tempted to just do a regular, sweet ice cream with persimmons. Maybe with a bit of cinnamon or nutmeg or something.

Carrot Cake

Rating: ****
Nickname: "The Carrot and the Stick"

I made a couple batches of ice cream for my moving day last weekend, as an incentive for the lovely friends and family who helped out. One was chai, a known favorite, and the other was Cheryl's suggestion for carrot cake ice cream, for which we used this recipe from the LA Times. The only modifications we made were not soaking the currants in whiskey, and adding 1/2 cup of milk (since we were that much short on the sour cream).

The candied pecans were extremely tasty, and had the most effect on the overall flavor. The cream cheese, sour cream, and lemon in the base made it more reminiscent of cheesecake than carrot cake, but I don't mind that at all, since cheesecake is awesome. The carrots themselves didn't actually come through very much in the taste, strangely enough (even with 2 cups of them). We had grated them, rather than dicing, thinking smaller would be better for going into ice cream. But maybe having slightly larger chunks would have been better. Still, the ice cream as a whole is very good, and very interesting, since there's so much going on in it.

One thing to note about making ice cream with so much cream cheese and sour cream in it: the base is so thick that it doesn't churn very well on its own. (You can see how thick it is in this photo, before it's even frozen, when we're just trying to pour it.) It very quickly seizes up into a giant lump in the middle and then just sits there. But luckily, this recipe has a lot of add-ins, so we just added those sooner rather than later, and that loosened in up enough to churn properly.

Dragon Fruit

Rating: *****
Nickname: +20 Against Dragon Attacks

Cheryl and John were in Miami last week and brought back a lot of dragon fruit. I'd never seen it before, and it's neat stuff. Once you peel off the "scales," the inside looks like a hot pink kiwi, though the taste is sweet and not so acidic. I found an easy ice cream recipe for it at The Gourmet Mama, so Cheryl and I made a batch to take to our gaming group tonight.

We used 4 dragon fruits, but I think they may have been smaller than the Gourmet Mama's, since the ice cream didn't come out quite as intensely pink. (We didn't measure the actual amount once it was mashed, to compare for sure.) But it still tastes absolutely delicious. It makes me think of strawberries and cream, though that's probably because my brain doesn't really know the taste of dragon fruit well, so it latches on to the nearest approximation. The kiwi-like seeds give it little crunches, but in an enjoyable, unobtrusive way.

If you ever find yourself in possession of some dragon fruit, make this ice cream. It's awesome.

Pear-Caramel

Rating: *****

This flavor is from The Perfect Scoop, via Herbivoracious (where you can get the recipe). I used Bartlett pears from the Palo Alto Farmers Market, four of them instead of three, since they were pretty small. The "caramel" part comes in when you melt all the sugar and cook the chopped-up pear in it for a while, which is pretty fun.

I tend to think of pears as tasting good but not being particularly powerful, so this ice cream surprised me with how strong the flavor was. Very impressive. I also like how it retains some of the pear texture, even though there are no actual pear pieces left in it. (The "puree" setting on my blender got rid of all those, so I skipped the step in the recipe about pressing it all through a strainer.)

As a complement to the ice cream, I made plain oatmeal cookies -- no raisins, chocolate chips, or anything. That made an excellent pear-ing, if you'll excuse the pun (or even if you won't).

Fudge Buttermilk

Rating: ***1/2

I had gotten some buttermilk recently to make pancakes. Since Safeway doesn't sell buttermilk in less than a quart, I had a fair amount left over. However, I had recently found a recipe for Fudge Buttermilk ice cream in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Homemade Ice Cream, so I decided to try it and find out why one might want to make ice cream with buttermilk.

Since there's 2 cups of buttermilk in the recipe, it has quite a sour taste, which makes an interesting contrast with the chocolate and the sugar. I don't think I care for the sourness as much as when I made brown sugar sour cream ice cream, but it's good, and makes you pay attention rather than just gobbling it down. I also noticed an interesting effect, which is that in the first split second of any given bite, it actually tastes rather like coffee. Then the sourness kicks in and takes over, but you can do it again on the next bite. I guess chocolate + sour ≈ coffee?

I did, however, decide at the last minute to add in a cup of mini chocolate chips, just to give the chocolate side a bit of a leg up in the deal.

Avocado Coconut

Rating: ***

This recipe started off here at AllRecipes.com, and I decided to add a little more texture and coconut with a 1/2 cup of sweetened shredded coconut. Also, we couldn't find the coconut cream that the recipe called for, so we combined 3/4 c. coconut milk and 1/3 c. coconut butter, on the assumption that the dairy conversion on this handy page would work well enough. (Another option I considered would have been to just swap coconut milk for the regular milk, and regular cream for the coconut cream.)

The end result certainly goes on the list of more "interesting" ice creams I've made. I don't think it was sweet enough, and would want to add more sugar, though Cheryl thinks it's good this way. However, it gets much better if you eat it on tortilla chips, like cold guacamole. Sounds wacky, but it works as long as your brain doesn't go on strike trying to combine concepts like that. (Mine kinda does.)

White Peach Blueberry

Rating: ****1/2
Nickname: "Sax on the Peach"

I happened to get some excellent blueberries and some pretty good white peaches from Trader Joe's the other day, so this flavor combo pretty much just sprang up, unpremeditated, when I felt like making something yesterday. The Ben & Jerry's book has the same recipe for blueberry and peach ice creams, so I just did that and split the fruit 50/50 between the two. That meant a cup of each, mashed up with lemon juice and 1/2 cup of sugar and let to sit for a while. Then the juice goes into a sweet cream base and the fruit gets added at the end of the freezing cycle.

The slight extra bit I added was a dash of cinnamon, which was an excellent idea, if I do say so myself. I'd probably even do a bit more next time.

Lychee

Rating: ****
Nickname: A Remedy of Lychees

This is a flavor that's been on my "to-try" list for a while now, though I can't remember what the original inspiration was. Mountain View Market on Castro St. carries canned lychees, though, so I finally got some of those and made this recipe from ma'ona. It's pretty good, though I think I actually prefer the straight ice cream part, since the fruit is kind of chewy, even when diced up small. Also, once it's fully frozen, the ice cream is kind of flaky, and harder to scoop out. I'm thinking that might be because there's less dairy and so much of the lychee syrup in it. But still, if you like lychees, it's pretty tasty, and that's the main thing.

[Note: I hear "lychee" pronounced different ways, but I like to say "lee-chee," for better punning with "leeches."]