Chocolate Peanut Butter

Rating: ****

Nickname: George Washington Carver

I made this for Suryani’s parents on our trip up to Portland this summer, and yes, it's been 12 years since the last post here!

This recipe started with a base from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home, by Jeni Britton Bauer. Her recipes include cream cheese, corn starch, and corn syrup (I substituted honey, since I didn’t have corn syrup). This makes a nice, thick ice cream without needing to deal with eggs and making a custard. I might in the future try with just the cream cheese and without the corn products, to simplify it and see how much difference they make. 

For the chocolate, I used Jerry’s trick from the Ben & Jerry’s book of including both baking chocolate squares and cocoa powder. At the end, I stirred in some all-natural unsalted creamy peanut butter that was soft enough to drizzle in as I stirred. I would have liked to have tried chunky, but didn’t have any on hand. It didn’t come out as swirly as I would have liked, but there were still bigger and smaller patches of peanut buttery bits in it, so that was alright. 

Overall, very tasty, and if I can figure out how to do a proper ribbon of peanut butter, it would probably be a 5-star recipe. 

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. :)

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. :-)

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.

Nutella and Chocolate

Rating: ****

It's been an entire month since I last made ice cream, which is far too long for summertime. And Sunday was even National Ice Cream Day, but I guess I didn't miss that by too much. I made this ice cream last night for Lacey's last California dinner party before she moves away.

For the basic nutella part, I just used this recipe from Carrie's Sweet Life. Then I smashed up a 4 oz. bar of bittersweet chocolate with a hammer and threw it in at the end. Pretty simple, and pretty tasty.

It did come out exceedingly sweet, though, so next time I'd use less sugar. 3/4 of a cup is plenty on its own for a batch of ice cream, then the nutella itself is also very sweet, so together they were a bit much. Luckily, the bittersweet chocolate was a good contrast. I might even put in a bit more of that.

Another nice variation, if you like nuts, might be to add chopped hazelnuts as well as chocolate.

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.)

Chocolate Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip

Rating: *****
From Ben & Jerry's book, combining:
Jerry's chocolate, page 45
Chocolate chip variation, page 45
Peanut butter variation, page 47
Awesome!
(Would be better with mini chocolate chips, though, instead of regular.)
(Made this for Rowyn's game night.)

Strawberries with Chocolate Swirls

Rating: ****
Ben & Jerry's Sweet Cream base (pg. 28) + 2t. vanilla
Strawberries as in strawberry recipe (pg. 54): 1 pint (chop small, no mashing) + 1/2 lemon juice + 1/3 c. sugar, sit in fridge for an hour.
Chocolate sauce: 2/3 c. semi-sweet choc chips, + 1/4 c. milk (should have been cream)
Start the basic ice cream in the ice cream maker.
Add strawberries at end, no juice, no mashing.
Pour out ice cream into container, mixing in chocolate sauce and strawberry juice as you go.
Ended up kind of melty, but maybe because weather was so hot when we made it.
Also, looks kind of messy. Good in concept, but not very presentable.
Next time, try just making thin layers of ice cream and sauce, without really mixing much. There are probably some tricks to doing this.

Spicy Chocolate

Rating: ****
Ben's chocolate recipe from Ben & Jerry's ice cream book, page 44.
Generous dash of cinnamon.
Nearly half a jar of McCormick's Mexican chili powder.
Note: Tastes much spicier once frozen, so don't over do it.
Cut spicy in half next time, maybe try straight cayenne pepper.

I also wrote about this in another post: Chocolate That Makes You Pay Attention:

One of the first things I learned about ice cream from Antonia was that you have to mix it up sweeter than you think because you taste the sweetness less once it's frozen. And the first thing I learned from this experiment was that this rule does not apparently apply to spiciness.

I started off with just tiny pinches of chili powder in the chocolate mix (from Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Book) but could hardly taste it. So I kept adding more... and more... and more.... And maybe somewhere in here we also got some sort of adaption factor to make me taste it less, which would only complicate things. Anyway, I finally decided it would probably be okay, so I went ahead and put it all in the ice cream machine. And once it was frozen it was hot! This is not ice cream to eat lightly. I'd probably halve the chili powder if I were to make this again. If I had measured it in the first place.

Good, though!