adventures in ice cream making

May 03, 2012

My mom bought me an ice cream maker attachment for my KitchenAid and it’s been my obsession for the past week. I ordered two ice cream cookbooks along with it, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home, and The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz. Now, I know David is king, but I’ve been focusing so far on Jeni’s, because the book is so pretty. And I like her story. She opened her first ice cream shop, called Scream, when she was only 22! That’s so cool and inspiring. To this day they still write the ice cream variety on the label by hand.

I have two really great friends coming into town this weekend (Hi Tom & Nikki!), and we always end up eating way too many sweets when we’re together. This is not the time to change our habits. It’s the time to test out my new ice cream maker, okay? I asked for any flavor requests, and was told “Something delicious – not like bacon acai rum ice cream.” Alrighty, so we’ll go the traditional route.

Now… let’s just say I haven’t had the best of luck so far. The first recipe I tried was Jeni’s Salty Caramel, which is one of their most popular flavors. There is a lot of prep work involved. I’m usually not very good at prep, so I took extra care to get everything organized before I even started. You have to mix some of the milk with cornstarch, then mix corn syrup with the heavy cream, then whisk the cream cheese with the salt. Then comes the crucial step of creating a caramel while paying attention to the heat, color, and smoke it gives off. The pot gets removed from the heat, something gets added in, it goes back on the heat, more stuff gets added in. It’s kinda complicated.

But I got through it. And into the ice cream maker it went. And 20 minutes later I tasted it and realized I put in 3x too much salt. Oops. But the texture was great! Nice and creamy. I’m just not sure how edible it is. Maybe if i mix some chocolate in to balance out the saltiness? Hmm.

This was no bueno. My friends are expecting ice cream, so I need to have something in my freezer for them other than Uber-Salty Caramel. So I decided to dial my game back and do a simple Cookies and Cream ice cream. But with Birthday Cake Oreos. But I couldn’t find Birthday Cake Oreos. So it became Reduced Fat Oreos Ice Cream.

And it tastes awesome. And there’s no salt in it at all! No chance for errors there!

Next up — Cinnamon Toast Crunch Ice Cream!

What other ice cream flavors should I experiment with!?

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