Chocolate

Ice-Cream Sunday 8: Ben & Jerry's

2/20/2007 12:07:00 PM

Those of you following my Ice-Cream Sunday Project will have noticed that I tend to use ice-cream recipes that have a cooked custard as their base. However, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one way to make an ice-cream.















Butter Pecan Ice-Cream

Ben & Jerry's ice-creams involve no cooking at all. They give 3 ice-cream base recipes in their cookbook, each of which requires you to do no more than whisk the ingredients together. To make their most popular base, "No. 1", you need to whisk eggs until light and fluffy, then whisk in some sugar, and finally add cream and milk. Easy peasy.

This week, I made the following flavours, based on their "Sweet Cream Base No. 1".

- Butter Pecan
- Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
- Mocha

Here are the pecans for the butter pecan ice-cream. You melt butter in a pan, add pecan nuts and a small amount of salt (very important for the taste!), and toast until the nuts are crispy. Then you set them aside to cool down, and add the cooled butter to the sweet cream base, before churning it. Once it's almost frozen, you tip in the toasted nuts.
















For the chocolate chip cookie dough flavour, you simply add chunks of frozen chocolate chip cookie dough (which I saved from the last time I made cookies) to the sweet cream base once it's nearly frozen.

The mocha ice-cream, as you would expect, has cocoa and coffee powder added to the mixture.

Now, I'm actually saving all these ice-creams for Sunday 25th of Febuary, so you will have to wait for the rest of the photos. I'm having a big ice-cream party, naturally. But as you can see from the first photo, I did have a sneaky taste of the butter pecan. The nuts were crispy and salty and wonderful. And the ice-cream had a smooth, easy-to-scoop texture. Woo!

However, because the ice-cream bases aren't made from a cooked custard, they have a much less pronounced eggy taste, and are very plain. I don't think that the sweet cream base would be very tasty or interesting if you churned it without a lot of additions. This means, however, that the bases make an excellent background for strong flavours, like nut chunks, brownies, cookies, caramel, fudge, malteasers, peanut butter cups.... how appropriate for Ben & Jerry!

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1 comments

  1. Delicious... once I got the thought of skinning a cat out of my mind!!

    ReplyDelete

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