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Vanilla Ice Cream. Pure and Simple. So Good.

I ate it with my favorite ice cream topping - colored sprinkles. I was going to make some of Leslie’s hot fudge, but I may or may not have been too lazy to make it.

As I was taking this picture I started to wish that I had dumped some sprinkles into the ice cream as a mix in, which reminded me of all the TCBY Shivers I used to eat in high school. YUM! I am so doing that next time I make some ice cream.

This is a great custard based ice cream recipe, and only requires a few steps to deliciousness. I steeped one vanilla bean in a mixture of whole milk and heavy cream, then tempered the hot milk mixture into the egg yolks and sugar, and finally let it cook for another minute or so until thickened and registered between 170-180F. I let my mixture chill in the fridge for a good 6 hours before churning it.

The verdict - The vanilla flavor mellowed nicely after a day in the freezer, and the ice cream had a perfect consistency balance of hardness and softness.

Now, what’s a girl to do with a quart of this stuff. Kind of hard to give away at the office, and I hate exercising too much to keep such delicious confections around the house.

This perfect for summertime recipe was chosen for Tuesdays with Dorie by Lynne of Cafe Lynnylu You can find the recipe at Lynne’s blog or on page 428-429 of
Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan.

I give you Apricot Honey Ice Cream.

This was a really yummy treat. Thanks to Tommi of Brown Interior for picking this wonderful recipe for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie. It can be found on page 437 of Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan.

I used apricots instead of peaches, because the peaches I bought turned out to be rotten. It is always nice when you go to start making something and realize that your main ingredient literally belongs in the trash. I could actually cut through the peach pits!

I read the playing around that Dorie provides and she said that you could also use nectarines or apricots. I like both of these more than peaches. Excellent!

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This is one of those posts that I have been putting off writing, because I just don’t know what I want to say about this ice cream. It was pretty good, I mean hell, it was ice cream after all. It is long gone from the freezer so I can’t retaste it for inspiration.

What I recall about the ice cream was that it was just okay, nothing spectacular. I like my ice cream to be more creamy and this was more, icy. I got the recipe from The Silver Spoon by Phaidon Press. This is a great book, it is like an encyclopedia of Italian food. It is on loan to us from my one and only sister Emily. She got it a few years ago as a graduation present. The book is literally thousands of pages, so I am slowly leafing through it for ideas and inspirations.

I also think that part of my problem with the ice cream was that Nick wanted to add dark chocolate chunks to it. And while I would normally not scoff at adding dark chocolate chunks to anything, I was just not feeling it in this coffee ice cream. I really love coffee ice cream, and I like it to be all smooth and coffee like. I don’t need any chocolate trying to interrupt me and the coffee. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t really like chocolate chunks in my ice cream period. There is something about the hard frozen chocolate pieces that doesn’t appeal to me. Does that make me weird?

So, I am not going to give a recipe because (a) I didn’t love this, and (b) it would be copyright infringement or some other sort of publishing violation since I would be copying it straight out of the book with zero changes.

Instead, I will ask you all to leave in the comment area what your favorite ice cream/frozen yogurt recipes are. I could use some suggestions in that department. We rarely make ice cream and I think our ice cream machine is feeling unloved.

By the way - that is Dorie Greenspan’s homemade hot fudge on the ice cream. (Now, that is my idea of how to add chocolate to ice cream) However, I was displeased with how it totally seized up and froze as soon as it hit the ice cream. Any tips?