Archive for the ‘Frozen Desserts’ Category
It is great to have an ice cream maker at home if you’re a big ice cream lover. Homemade ice cream, straight out of the machine, is something that is hard to beat with storebought products. It’s also fun because it is so easy to customize the ice cream with your favorite mix-ins, whether you like to add crushed up Oreo cookies or a swirl of caramel sauce. There are some ice cream recipes out there that you can make without an ice cream maker and still get outstanding results. One recipe that comes to mind uses sweetened condensed milk as a base and has whipped heavy cream folded into it, which adds the air that is normally incorporated into ice cream by an ice cream mixer. It’s easy to make, works out extremely well and, of course, uses no special equipment of any kind.
No-Churn Chocolate Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream is this type of recipe. It starts out with a mixture of sweetened condensed milk, chocolate sauce, vanilla and peppermint extracts. Heavy cream is beaten to soft peaks and folded into the base. The resulting ice cream has an almost mousse-like consistency that just melts when it hits your tongue. It has a light chocolate flavor with just enough mint added to it. It is light and creamy, and it is never too hard to scoop straight out of the freezer. I have used homemade chocolate sauce when making this ice cream, but it is honestly just as good with a good quality chocolate or chocolate fudge sauce to use as flavoring (because you know you have some for homemade sundaes).
I typically fold small chocolate chips or coarsely chopped dark chocolate into this ice cream before freezing it. If you have mint chocolate baking pieces, which are sometimes available in grocery stores, or chopped mint chocolate bars, they will work even better and get a little more mint into your finished product.
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Candy corn is a fall and Halloween staple, even though many people have a love-hate relationship with the candy. They’re quite pretty to look at, they make a great addition to a candy dish and my favorite brand (Brach’s) as nice notes of honey and vanilla to it. Brach’s actually sells enough candy corn (and the related Mallowcremes) each year that, if they were all laid end to end, they would circle the globe four times. On the other hand, candy corn’s over-the-top sweetness and slightly gritty, yet marshmallowy, texture means that these are not on the top of everyone’s Halloween candy list. I happen to be a candy corn fan when they come in small doses, and find them to be a good source of inspiration for some colorful desserts, including this Candy Corn Terrine.
This frozen dessert has no candy corn in it. It consists of white, orange and yellow layers of ice cream and sorbet that mimic the colors of a classic candy corn. I used a good quality vanilla bean ice cream for the white portion, a blend of orange sherbert and vanilla ice cream for the orange, and a mixture of mango gelato and lemon sorbet for the yellow layer. The different colors are layered in a loaf pan and then frozen. You can serve it in slices, or carve it into candy corn-shaped triangles to serve.
The vanilla bean ice cream was an obvious choice when I needed a white layer. The mango was a very dark yellow color (I used Ciao Bella gelato) and the lemon sorbet (Haagen Dazs) was almost white, so combining the two resulted in the perfect bright yellow. I mixed the softened ice creams in the food processor to blend them. The orange was a bit more problematic because my orange sherbert was a very pale color. I ended up blending it with some ice cream and adding a small amount of orange food coloring (I recommend a gel coloring) to get the bright orange I was looking for. You can use the same trick or look out for a dark orange sorbet when making yours.
Candy corn – Brach’s brand, anyway – is made with real honey, and in the past when I’ve made a candy corn-inspired recipe, such as Candy Corn Cookies, I’ve used honey to help capture that flavor. I did the same thing in this terrine, adding layers of honey in between the layers of ice cream. The honey isn’t a dominant flavor, but it oozes out between the layers when slicing and when you’re eating the terrine you get just enough honey to know it’s there.
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Homemade ice cream is a wonderful treat, but you really do need an ice cream maker for the best and most consistent results. There are many affordable ice cream makers out there (and plenty of more expensive ones!) that will pay for themselves if you make ice cream yourself regularly. If you don’t make ice cream on a regular basis, however, you probably don’t want another appliance taking up valuable room in your kitchen. So, is it possible to make great ice cream at home without an ice cream maker? Yes, and the secret is to use dry ice.
Dry ice is solid carbon dioxide and it has a temperature of -109.3F (78.5C). It is primarily used for preserving ice cream and other frozen foods at very cold temperatures. For instance, it may be used to chill the interior of an ice cream cart on a hot day at the park so the popsicles don’t melt before they’re sold. It is also often added to Halloween punch because of the fog-like clouds that it generates when put into water or other liquids.
But how can you make ice cream with it?
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Strawberries are at their very best for only a few weeks each year. You can find great strawberries on either end of the growing season, from a patch that hit their stride early or from some that blossomed later than usual, but the ones that are really worth eating are those that you get during the height of the season. I freeze some strawberries for use during the off-season, but I think an even better way to enjoy strawberries into the fall and winter is to make a couple of batches of Fresh Strawberry Ice Cream and stock your freezer with them.
This strawberry ice cream is a very simple recipe, made with lots of fresh strawberries and a egg-enriched custard base that produces a very creamy finished product. To make it, the fresh berries are pureed with sugar, then added to the custard base. It may seem as though their is quite a lot of sugar in this ice cream, especially considering that you are using already sweet berries to start with, but there are two very good reasons for this. First, the sugar helps keep the ice cream creamy and soft, much smoother than it would be with less sugar. Second, when foods are cold their flavors are more muted, so adding a little extra sugar to the ice cream base helps the strawberries to stand out after the ice cream is churned.
Instead of infusing the milk mixture with a vanilla bean when making the custard for this ice cream, I opted to use vanilla extract. I only wanted a little bit of vanilla flavor in my ice cream and didn’t want anything to compete with the flavor of the strawberries. The result is a sweet and very creamy ice cream that is bursting with fresh strawberry flavor. I got my strawberry puree to be very fine, so there were only traces of the whole fruit in my finished ice cream. If you want to add in some strawberry pieces, finely chop a few berries and stir them into the ice cream after it has finished churning and before you put it in the freezer.
This ice cream will keep well in the freezer, stored in a well-sealed container, for a couple of months. If you plan on having enough ice cream to enjoy through the holidays, however, I’d recommend making two or three batches. It makes 1 1/2 quarts of ice cream, which is a size that most at-home ice cream makers can handle easily.
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Ice cream sandwiches are a fun summertime treat. They’re easy to make, because you can take just about any pair of cookies and stuff them full of whatever ice cream you have in the freezer for an instant ice cream sandwich. Now, some types of cookies work better as ice cream sandwiches than others. You want cookies that are tender, slightly soft and fairly thin. This results in ice cream sandwiches that you can fit in your mouth and won’t be hard as rocks when you make them in advance and store them in the freezer! But brownies often work better than cookies. Not only does chocolate go with just about every flavor of ice cream out there, but brownies are more tender than cookies and tend to make a softer, easier to eat ice cream sandwich that most cookies do.
These Mint Chocolate Chip Brownie Ice Cream Sandwiches are definitely a great choice for ice cream sandwich lovers. The brownies are rich and chocolaty, with a hint of cakiness to them that helps keep them easy to bite into even after freezing (great when you don’t have a whole lot of patience for digging into that sandwich!). The brownies are baked in a 9×13 pan and, after cooling, the whole batch of brownies is cut in half. Softened ice cream is spread onto on half of the brownies and the second half is stacked on top. Chill the whole thing and then use a sharp knife to divide up the block into small ice cream sandwiches. The brownie layers are still relatively thick (especially compared to a store bought ice cream sandwich), but I definitely like to have a good brownie:ice cream ratio.
I used mint chocolate chip ice cream inside of these brownies and added a little peppermint extract to the brownie batter, as well. The mint chocolate brownies will still go nicely with chocolate or vanilla ice cream, but omit the mint extract if you prefer to use something like peach ice cream or rocky road as your filling. If you really want to make the brownie layer thinner, cut the sheet in half, chill the brownies slightly and use a large, serrated knife to cut them in half horizontally. You’ll get less brownie in each sandwich, but you’ll end up with twice as many sandwiches this way!
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