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.

Purple Yam with Marshmallow Swirls

Rating: ***
Nickname: "I Yam What I Yam"

Well, this is one of the more amusingly weird ones I've made in a while. The inspiration for it came from sweet potato marshmallow casserole, which I thought was very strange the first time I saw it, though I loved it once I tried it. Cheryl had the idea to use purple yams instead of regular orange ones because... well, because they're awesomely purple, I suppose. I'm sure most of us don't get enough purple in our diets.

However, I'm afraid we went a bit overboard in the yam department. I'd gotten a big one -- over a pound, I think -- and we didn't think not to use all of it. Half to 3/4 of a pound probably would have been better. But anyway, we steamed it, then used electric beaters to mash it up with the cream, sugar, and vanilla. It seemed to be okay when we put it in the fridge to cool down, but when we took it out we found it had nearly solidified. We beat in more milk until we could pour it into the actual ice cream maker, but it just firmed right back up again. So it was getting colder, but not really churning much -- it was just like a big lump of mashed potatoes thumping around in the machine. Which meant it didn't really need to be in there, so we just took it out to put in the freezer.

We made the marshmallow sauce from The Ultimate Ice Cream Book, and cooled it in the fridge while making the ice cream. That made it cold enough but still pourable, so it could be swirled in with the ice cream. Cheryl gets credit for the better swirl method -- after putting the ice cream in a container, she made a spiral trough in it and spooned the sauce in. Much neater than just trying to mix it, and easy since this ice cream holds its shape so well.

Anyway, I only rated this a 3 because, while it is sweet and yummy, it's still much more like eating mashed potatoes than ice cream. I'm sure it could be a 4 if we'd planned the proportions better.

Alternate nickname: "I Yam 30" (since this was my birthday ice cream).

Pumpkin

Rating: ***
From this Elise.com recipe.
We wanted to make more than a quart, but not double it, so we sort of fudged all the amounts up a bit.
Tastes basically like cold pumpkin pie. Don't know what else I was expecting, though. I'd have rated it higher if I cared more for pumpkin pie.