unintentional milk chocolate ice cream

I haven't made homemade ice cream in ages, so I was excited to dust off my ice cream machine and get it running again. I kept things simple and settled on chocolate chip ice cream. For the base vanilla ice cream, I used Jeni's cookbook. I thought that having big chocolate chips throughout the ice cream might be a bit much, so I melted the milk chocolate with a few tablespoons of heavy cream to make it liquid, and drizzled it into the ice cream as it was churning. The result was, well, not what I had planned. Instead of vanilla ice cream speckled with chocolate, I got milk chocolate ice cream.

I realize now that I should have let the ice cream churn until it was almost completely frozen before drizzling in the chocolate. That way it would have been cold enough to freeze the chocolate into little bits. Oh well, this ice cream still hit the spot!

Jeni's recipes never seem to disappoint. You can see a few of my favourite recipes from the book here, here and here.

foodstuffs

Some random food-related pics from this past week:

1. Trying out a new flavour of Pretz from Sanko. Supposedly black pepper chicken. Tasted like peppery chicken bouillon. Oh well. The melon cream(y) soda was pretty refreshing.

2. A new-ish addiction: milk chocolate covered toasted corn from Soma. Salty and sweet, I polished off this bag in no time.

3. The first scoops of the summer at The Big Chill. So many flavours! 

I settled on watermelon sherbert and pistachio kulfi. Can't believe I've never been here before.

4. Maxwell getting his first taste (ok, more like whiff) of an original steamer hot dog from The Little Dog (conveniently located beside The Big Chill).

It was a good week! 

lemon cream ice cream

This lemon cream ice cream is tart, tangy, sweet and creamy. It reminds me of hot summer days, Parisian lemon tarts and freshly-squeezed lemonade. First ice cream of the year!

The recipe comes from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home, but you can also find the recipe here.

chocolate chocolate cookies

I recently made the chocolate chocolate cookies from the Milk Bar cookbook (last Momofuku post for a while, I swear).

They definitely had a very rich chocolate flavour (maybe too much so for my taste). But the texture was great. That's the thing that I've found with all the Momofuku cookies that I've made—the texture is perfect: crispy edges, chewy middles. The recipes always call for what you think will be too much salt, but that salty bite really complements and balances out the sweetness of the cookies.

I actually went one step further with these and made a Cherry Garcia ice cream sandwich...that I sadly couldn't finish for fear of falling into a sugar coma.

roasted pistachio ice cream

I was supposed to be on an ice cream hiatus. Mostly because over the last month, I've consumed way too much of the stuff. But I just had to try one more flavour. My favourite: pistachio. Now the hiatus really begins. Sigh. 

You can find the recipe online here. I use tapioca starch rather than cornstarch and chill the base mixture overnight rather than use the ice bath.

buckeye state ice cream

More ice cream success using Jeni's cookbook. This time a peanut butter-based ice cream with specks of crunchy dark chocolate. I thought the combination would be too sweet for me, but using natural peanut butter instead of the sugar-loaded kind and dark chocolate rather than milk resulted in a perfectly balanced ice cream. 

adapted from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams At Home

2 C whole milk

1 tbsp + 1 tsp tapioca starch

3 tbsp) cream cheese 

1/2 C natural peanut butter 

1/2 tsp kosher salt

1 1/4 C whipping cream

2/3 C sugar

2 tbsp corn syrup

2 tbsp honey

4 oz dark chocolate, chopped (I used Lindt 50% dark chocolate)

1. Mix 2 tablespoons of the milk with the tapioca starch in a small bowl and set aside.

2. Whisk cream cheese, peanut butter, and salt in a medium bowl until smooth. 

3. Combine remaining milk, cream, sugar, corn syrup, and honey in a pot and bring to a rolling boil on medium-high heat. Boil for 4 minutes. Remove from heat and gradually whisk in cornstarch slurry.

4. Place the pot back on the heat and bring back to a boil and cook, stirring with a spatula, until slightly thickened (about 1 minute). 

5. Gradually whisk the hot milk mixture into the peanut butter mixture until smooth. Place plastic wrap directly over the mixture to avoid a skin from forming and refrigerate until cold (the cookbook says to place the mixture in a freezer bag and submerge it in a bowl of ice water until chilled which would be faster, but I can be bothered to make ice cubes). 

6. Pour the chilled mixture into an ice cream maker and churn for about 30 minutes or until ice cream is thick and pulls away from the sides of the canister.

7. While the ice cream is churning, melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Set aside until cool, but still pourable.

8. When the ice cream is almost done, drizzle the melted chocolate through the opening of the ice cream maker and allow it to solidify and break up in the ice cream (about 2 minutes). 

9. Pour ice cream into a container and freeze for at least 4 hours or until firm.

almond brittle ice cream

When I bought Jeni's ice cream cookbook, one of the things that intrigued me the most was the lack of egg yolks in her recipes. Instead she uses cream cheese and thickeners (like tapioca starch). Now I'm not one for low-fat or no-fat (shudder) anything, and thought that egg yolks, even though high in fat, were what gave ice cream that rich, custard-y texture, so I was a bit worried (even though Jeni's ice cream doesn't boast to be low-fat at all).

First I had to decide on a flavour. Gooey butter cake? Salty caramel? Bangkok peanut? This was hard. I settled on the basic vanilla bean and added chunks of almond brittle (also from the book) for extra texture.

Holy crap this was some good ice cream! Like, really really good. Like this may be my new go-to ice cream base recipe. It's creamy and luscious even without the egg yolks. The texture was perfect and it softens up nicely for easy scooping.

You can find the vanilla bean ice cream recipe online here. I'll be trying another flavour later on this week, so watch for it soon.

books!

Two new cookbooks somehow appeared on my bookshelf this week.

The Japanese Grill was a bit of an impulsive buy. I had just spent an hour or so looking up authentic tabletop yakitori grills (I don't even remember why) and came across this book. I wish there were more pictures, but most of all I wish I had a bbq that I could try some of the recipes on.

Check out those macaroon ice cream sandwiches! Jeni's ice creams are apparently delicious so I was super happy when I spotted this book a few weeks back. Now that it's sweltering outside I've been craving ice cream like a madwoman. I'll be giving my ice cream maker a good workout this weekend.

strawberry oreo ice cream

With all those strawberries I picked, I decided to bust out the ice cream maker. This cookie-studded, berry-laced ice cream is a copy cat of the Dairy Queen Strawberry Golden Oreo blizzard. A nice treat on a hot afternoon.

1 1/2 C sliced strawberries
3 tbsp sugar
juice of half a lemon
8 Golden Oreos, broken into chunks

ice cream  base:
6 egg yolks
3 C whipping cream
2/3 C sugar
half of a vanilla bean, scraped of seeds
pinch of salt

1. Mix berries, sugar and lemon juice. Cover and let sit in the fridge for at least an hour. Drain juices.

2. Combine 2 cups of the cream, sugar and pinch of salt in a pot and heat until warm and sugar has dissolved. Take off of the heat and add vanilla bean pod and seeds. Cover and let sit off of the heat for 30 minutes.

3. Place remaining 1 cup of cream in a bowl with a mesh strainer over top. In another bowl, whisk egg yolks. Slowly add the warm cream mixture, whisking constantly so that the yolks don't cook. After all of the cream mixture has been added, place the mixture back into the pot and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until mixture is thickens and coats the back of a spoon.

4. Pour the mixture through the strainer into the remaining cream. Mix to combine. Place a piece of plastic wrap directly over the mixture to avoid a skin from forming. Chill until completely cold or overnight. Churn in an ice cream maker for about 30 minutes or until it looks like soft serve. Stir in strawberries and cookies. Place in a container and let the ice cream firm up in the freezer.

screaming for ice cream...sandwiches

Sometimes all you need is a good cookie to make a bad day better.

But when you've had a really bad day, you'll need something more. Like two cookies. And some ice cream in between.