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."]

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.

Duo: White Chocolate + Strawberry

Rating: ****

I made these two ice creams for Cathy's birthday party yesterday. The white chocolate recipe was from The Ultimate Ice Cream Book, and used 12 oz. of white chocolate, and no other sugar. The strawberry was straight out of Ben & Jerry's, and used strawberries from the Santa Cruz farmers market.

I thought the white chocolate was a bit odd. Mom said I could have used a better quality white chocolate, so that might have been it (but I was just using up some that she had bought, so hmph). The strawberry tasted excellent, though we had considerable freezing problems. The ice cream maker had been back in the freezer overnight, but still somehow hadn't gotten fully frozen. We kept putting it back in the freezer, ice cream and all, and re-churning it at intervals, but it never got beyond thick slush before it was time to eat it.

Luckily, this turned out quite well anyway. We served it all up as scoops of white chocolate ice cream, with a sloshy dollops of strawberry covering it. Yum!

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).

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.)