Cooking Crusade

Did you know that if you google “Ice Cream Recipe”, that Caramel Ice Cream Recipe from Taste.com is the third recipe to show up?
It’s a true story. It happened to me. It could happen to you, too.

Well of COURSE I had to make it. Caramel is one of the best things in the world. It’s been a favorite flavor of mine, trumping strawberry and chocolate by far in the ice cream, ice cream topping and milkshake flavor stakes of my childhood. Ever since I got an ice cream maker for my birthday, I’ve been on the look out for new ice cream recipes (as well as dreaming up a few of my own. I’m thinking raspberry and white chocolate, I’m thinking honeycomb, I’m thinking banana with caramel swirl, brownie mosaic ice cream, chai ice cream, caramel ice cream with chai swirl, mint choc chip…! The opportunities are endless!)

I had a look at David Lebovitz (author of the Perfect Scoop)’s Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream recipe, but it looked soooo complicated!! I know, whinge, whinge. But I’m a sucker for simplicity. And the taste.com recipe was quite a bit easier.

I also had some extra shortbread Chrissy cookies leftover in the fridge that nobody was using. I decided to add a bit of a tasty cookie crunch as an experiment and it totally worked.

I did actually adapt the Taste.com recipe just slightly.

Ingredients

• 5 egg yolks
• 350 mls full cream milk
• 1 scant cup of vanilla caster sugar (I just throw my old vanilla beans into the caster sugar container, voila! Who wouldn’t ever want to use vanilla sugar? Also it saves me adding extract each time. By the way, if you don’t have vanilla caster sugar, don’t sweat it. It ain’t necessary, I just use it cos I have it, but regular would taste juuust fine.)
• 300 mls thickened cream

Separate your eggs, save your whites for something else (may I suggest angel food cake, meringue buttercream or an egg white omelette?)
Whisk your yolks in a bowl.

Heat milk in a small saucepan and whisk into eggs.

In another clean saucepan heat the caster sugar with 2 tablepoons of water to make a caramel. Heat to medium until the syrup becomes a dark caramel colour, but be careful not to burn it. Pour in the cream, being very careful as it bubbles up. Mine formed a few lumps of caramel, but don’t worry as these will melt when you heat the mixture later. Sorry I didn’t get any pics of the caramel being made, but it was a very delicate and fast process so I didn’t have time to snap anything.

Pour caramel into egg and milk mixture and heat over medium until thickened. Churn in an ice cream mixture according to instructions or check out the taste.com recipe for instructions if you don’t have a mixer

To make the cookie crunch, take shortbread cookies, like these ones;

Place them in a ziplock bag.

And seal it up.

Grab a rolling pin and bash it up. Don’t go crazy, you still want some big biscuity pieces to crunch into, so you don’t want it too finely crushed.

About five minutes before your ice cream has finished mixing, pour the biscuit crumbs into your mixer.

If you are making it with an electric hand mixer sans ice cream mixer, I would recommend adding the crumbs to the ice cream before the final freeze and last time you blend it.

After mixing for a good 30 minutes with your mixer, chuck it into the freezer to finish freezing. Scoop it up.

Success!

Enjoy this one! I know I did

Christine

As some of you may know, I got an ice-cream maker for my birthday.

So of course, you are going to see an increase in ice-cream recipes that hit this blog.

This is the first ice cream I tried out with the new ice cream maker! I wanted to go for super simple but still super delicious. I think I’ve found a keeper!

The best thing about this recipe is that it’s sooo easy and it has quite few ingredients (my fave!)

You basically whip together condensed milk with thickened cream, churn it and then pour in an easy blueberry sauce.
Ingredients

• 1 can condensed milk
• 300 mls thickened cream
• 2 cups blueberries (i used frozen, you could use fresh)
• 2-3 tablespoons caster sugar
• 3-4 tablespoons cornflour

Method:

Start out by making a blueberry sauce. Pour frozen or fresh berries into a large microwave safe bowl and sprinkle over caster sugar. I didn’t want to add too much sugar because I know that the condensed milk/cream would be quite sweet already. Mash berries roughly with a fork and microwave to release juices (if using fresh berries, just mash roughly with a fork and leave to macerate for about five minutes. add a couple tablespoons of water and continue steps for frozen berries in the microwave). With the frozen berries, microwave for about five minutes. You should have released quite a bit more juice from the berries. Mash again roughly (make sure you don’t make it into a mush. You want this to retain some nice big juicy berries in the ice-cream.) Sprinkle over corn flour, about 1-2 tablespoons. Microwave again to thicken. Experiment a little with how much/little corn flour you want to add. I like having a particularly thick sauce to add to the ice cream. You may want a different consistency. When you have finished thickening the sauce, allow it to cool in the fridge (OK so this is important. I got impatient and didn’t let it cool.. obviously this made the ice cream maker freak out a little and it didn’t set properly the first time – although it was fine after I stuck it in the freezer overnight.) So I would recommend allowing it to cool for a good couple of hours in the fridge.

While the blueberry sauce is cooling, pour condensed milk and cream into another separate large bowl. Whisk together until thoroughly combined, set aside.

When the berry sauce is ready, churn the condensed milk and cream into ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions. Pour in berry sauce through the spout. This sauce makes the most stunning ice-cream colour ever! No artificial colouring added

Try it on French Toast, it’s fabulous!

note: i have to say that this ice-cream does not have the exact same consistency to regular ice cream, it is a little more icy and a little hard to get out of the container from the freezer. just microwave it for about 10-15 seconds and it should scoop out just fine and tastes great!

Love, xoxox

Christine