Bites from other Blogs

Summer is starting to get into full swing and that means that ice cream is appearing more regularly on my dessert menu. My new cookbook, How to Make Ice Cream, is a great place to get started if you want to learn the basic techniques involved in making ice cream at home. These recipes from other blogs also caught my eye this week and will get your summer started off on the right foot.

• Sweet and spicy is a good flavor combination because it offers a lot of contrast, just like sweet and salty. The Beeroness‘s Strawberry Jalapeno Beer Popsicles use plenty of fresh, ripe strawberries as their base, combining the sweet berries with spicy jalapenos and a light IPA. The beer brings everything together and adds quite a bit of complexity to the otherwise straightforward flavor combination.
• Churro Ice Cream Sandwiches from With Love and Cupcakes feature homemad churros sandwiching homemade horchata ice cream. The churros are made as rounds, rather than as long, thin sticks, which helps them hold on to a lot of ice cream. These are best when they are freshly made, so be prepared to snack on a few right away.
• Recipe Runner‘s Raspberry Cheesecake Yogurt Popsicles are rich and creamy, just like a cheesecake should be. The popsicles also have another element that every cheesecake should have: a crumb crust. The almond crumb crust is added to the popsicle mold after the filling is poured in, so it freezes in place and gives you a little bit of texture when you finally start to eat your popsicle.
• Cookies and cream has always been one of my personal favorite ice cream flavors, especially when generous chunks of cookie are involved. A Cookie Named Desire combines cookies and cream with one of my other favorite flavors – coffee – to create a delicious Coffee Oreo Ice Cream. The ice cream starts with a creamy base that is infused with freshly ground coffee. It is cooked and enriched with heavy cream and a few egg yolks before being ready to churn. Plenty of crushed Oreo cookies are added as the finishing touch. Don’t forget to leave a few big chunks in the ice cream for cookie-lovers like me!

And if you are looking for a non-dairy ice cream option, check out my other new cookbook, Making Vegan Frozen Treats!