I would love to claim that I came up with this idea, but sadly I didn’t. I came across a new food blog, Almost Bourdain, amongst all the beautiful dishes, there was popcorn ice cream. This was a revelation, I needed to make it and I needed to make it now!

I skipped the caramel sauce, much as I love salted caramel I wanted to focus purely on the ice cream for now. I also just used the Orville Redenbacher’s Kettle Korn. Kettle corn is my favourite and we had these on hand, one bag yielded enough for the ice cream plus a little for me to snack on while I cooked!

The liquid is half cream and half milk, bring to a boil with half the sugar and the corn. It will look like there’s too much corn for the liquid but the kernels at the bottom will get soggy and squish down allowing slowly all the corn to be covered. Turn off and leave to steep, the recipe left it for just half an hour. I left it for about an hour and a half and the ice cream had a beautiful flavour.

Strain out the popcorn and bring the milk back to the boil. Mix the egg and sugar and continue making like a normal custard.  When you strain the corn out you will notice the milk has almost an oily sheen to it, don’t worry, this doesn’t affect the flavour or mouthfeel of the ice cream at all, it’s probably what helped it form such a wonderful smooth texture.

Leave to cool overnight and churn following the manufacturer’s instructions.. the usual deal.

This tastes so much like popcorn thanks to the long steeping time that your mind gets confused, this flavour should be warm and crunchy, why is it smooth and cold? It’s fantastic though, I’m very happy with how it turned out.

I’m a bit of a fan of mixing sweet and savoury, I haven’t done a whole lot of it but the idea intrigues me and I’ve liked what I have tried.

Bacon seems to be a trend at the moment, it’s in everything. So I figured why not join the club and give it a go. It’s the one instance where the salty American style bacon worked out well as it balanced with the sweetness.

I caramelised the bacon first, spreading it on a sheet pan and sprinkling it with brown sugar. I gave it 15 minutes on the first side before turning it over and adding more sugar.

Then the length of time it goes depends on the thickness of the bacon, it’s best to let it go 10 minutes and then start keeping an eye on it. You want it to be caramelised but not burnt. Crispy if possible but not tooth shatteringly hard. I probably could have let these go a little longer (a minute or two) but not very much so. I love how even the meat sections are turning translucent! Transfer to a baking rack and put to one side to cool.

The base is like any ice cream base.. mostly. I used a mix or brown and white sugar for a little added richness, next time I want to try all brown sugar. And a little butter is melted and tempered into the egg and sugar mix.

Then the cream is taken to scalding and tempered into the eggs, and everything goes back into the pan and is cooked to al a nap. You know the drill by now! The whisky is added once it is strained. Chill overnight, it makes the base nice and thick so it churns easily.

While that’s chilling chop up the bacon into small chunks, some crumbs are nice too.

Right at the end of churning fold in the bacon and put the ice cream into it’s prepared containers. Freeze for 8 hours or so before serving.

I made a couple more rashers of caramelised bacon to garnish, these I overcooked a little (only slightly intentionally), but breaking them into bacon “chips” was fun to serve with the ice cream.

I really wish I had videoed people trying this ice cream, their faces went through several stages of shock, surprise and enjoyment as they tentatively tried the first bite, they tasted the whisky, everything was good and then oh! There’s the first taste of bacon… After the surprise wore off we actually got a lot of good reviews for it. We served it with some maple sauce which went down very well, so much so we’re considering a maple swirl in it next time we make it!

Pumpkin ice cream is a little confusing, the flavours, the warmth of the spices all taste like pumpkin pie. But pumpkin pie has neither this texture, or the temperature of the ice cream!

To have something that is cold, frozen in fact, but gives off a warmth tricks the palate so it no longer knows what you’re eating. It’s a comfort food for many people, pumpkin pie that is, this allows it to be enjoyed during the summer and warmer months when you don’t want to have the hassle of making a pie (or have the oven on heating the house up).

You start with a basic custard, this used just yolks, sugar and milk. I split the sugar between the milk and the yolks as it was too much for the yolks alone.

In a separate container whisk together the cream, spices and pumpkin puree. Once the custard is done strain it over the pumpkin mix then whisk the two together.

Cover it in cling wrap and leave it to chill. Adding the custard to the cold pumpkin and cream helps start the cooling process but you really want to leave it for a few hours, overnight is better.

I found that this ice cream churned rather hard. It’s texture now that it’s frozen is a little icy. I’m contemplating following David Lebovitz’s lead and adding a tablespoon or two of liquor to the mix, I imagine a dark rum or brandy would augment the flavour well.

If you don’t want to used canned pumpkin you can make your own puree by either boiling or roasting the pumpkin (depending on the flavours you want) then blending until smooth.

I also think turning it into an actual pumpkin pie ice cream (as opposed to pumpkin ice cream) might be a nice touch, either with some baked pastry flaked in, or a graham crust broken in.. yes? no? maybe?

Either way this recipe is definitely on the first steps to becoming a winning recipe.. Now, if only I liked vegetables in desserts!

Recipe – from Ice Cream! by Pippa Cuthbert
—–
Makes 1 qt

400ml Whole Milk
3 Egg Yolks
200g Sugar
450g Pumpkin Puree
1/2tsp Nutmeg
1/2tsp Cinnamon
250ml Heavy Cream

I wanted to end the month with chocolate, I’ve managed to stay off it the entire month which is quite a feat for me! Wanting to make a slight twist rather than a ‘plain old’ chocolate ice cream I decided to make a sorbet instead. So, as a bonus this is dairy and egg free, assuming you’re using an appropriate chocolate, it’s vegan and lactose free, and it’s still yummy!

This really is nice and simple to make. Bring the sugar and water to a boil, add the cocoa powder and whisk it together. Here is where I failed a little and didn’t boil it out. My recipe said boil to get rid of the alkali taste, since I was using Dutched cocoa I didn’t think it would be necessary. Turns out I was wrong and it also gets rid of the powdery taste that the cocoa leaves otherwise.

I decided to up the chocolate and use the (specially imported by my Mum) 100% chocolate from Willie’s Cacao. This made it very dark, so not necessarily to everyone’s taste, but this recipe is good with semisweet (milk and white requires different ratios). Chop up all the chocolate and put it into a bowl, pour over the boiled cocoa mix.

Let it sit for a minute or two then whisk together. Bring up to volume with some ice, this helps cool it down, and gives the right ratio of water. It can be churned as soon as it is cooled, or it can be chilled overnight. If you do chill it overnight it may separate out but it’ll whisk back together just fine.

It does seem to get very hard once frozen, but it is very tasty and rich.

I wanted to serve this with something a little more interesting. Brandy snaps are something I’ve served ice cream in many times, their predominant ginger flavour would work nicely with the chocolate (unlike the sorbet they aren’t vegan). They’re very simple, just brown sugar and butter melted together.

Add some brandy and the mix will bubble right up. Stir together and add some flour and ginger. Spoon onto a baking sheet and bake for 8-10 minutes until they have become all lacy.

They will come out very soft and you need them to cool a little so you can pick them up and then mold them over a bowl (or in any shape you like, round a wooden spoon handle will give nice little tubes) while they’re still soft. Once they’re cool they will harden. Store in a cool, airtight container if you aren’t using them straight away.

Serve the ice cream in the brandy snaps, add fresh raspberries, et voila, a dessert fit for a king!

Caramel refers of course to cooked sugar, specifically sugar that has been cooked to the 320°-350°F range so it is an amber to golden colour.

The word caramel was first recorded in 1725, it comes from the Spanish caramelo. The source of caramelo is unknown, but some believe it is related to the Latin calamellus, a  form of calamus, meaning reed or cane—a reference to sugar cane, we think.

Soft caramel candy is an American invention, though no one is sure when. All that is known is someone added butter and dairy to caramelised sugar and created creme caramels, by the mid 1800s they were featured in recipe books.

All the flavour in this ice cream comes from the caramelised sugar, the aim is to get it as close to black jack (410°F where the sugar turns black and then decomposes) without burning it. A lot of dairy is being added which will weaken the flavour, so a caramel at 320°F which is barely amber won’t be noticeable in the finished product. This lead to me declaring a new stage of sugar, “heart in the throat,” where you’re so afraid to turn away or even blink for fear of it being burnt and ruined before you can add the cream.

This is actually just a standard vanilla ice cream recipe, it’s just the process that’s different. Rather than whisking the eggs and sugar you caramelise the sugar (with a hint of water if you’re not a fan of dry caramel), adding the cream and milk when it hits that “heart in throat” stage, then once it’s whisked together and smooth temper it into the yolks. This takes a little more care as the caramel with cream added will be much hotter than scalded cream that you would usually temper the yolks with. Plus the sugar is usually whisked with the yolks to help stabilise them and prevent them from curdling. So temper slowly and carefully. Then heat gently until it’s coating consistency.

I’m afraid the caramel and tempering happened so fast no photos were forthcoming. This is the mix right before it was chilled though.

This ice cream came out fantastically, definitely one of the winners for the month. The deep bitter undertones reminded some of the tasters of coffee, even some non caramel fans found it pleasing. It’s not super sweet and that’s the key, getting the caramel dark enough so the bitterness counters the sweetness and balances perfectly.

I wanted something light and summery, fruity and refreshing. There are plenty of fresh peaches around at the moment but I didn’t want to do peach all on it’s own. By a wonderful coincidence it’s also mango season (although you can get them all year anyway). I’d seen peaches and mangos together and so my thought process was mostly along the lines of “why not”

This is one sorbet I didn’t have a recipe for, I was making it up as I went along. So I started with a simple syrup and simmered the peaches and mangos in until they were tender. Out came the stick blender and once smooth it was strained, just to be sure.

Since I didn’t have a recipe to go off of I needed to make sure I had the right sugar content in my sorbet so it would churn properly. Thanks to Michael’s brewing we had a hydrometer on hand. Being the… thorough *grins* person he is we had the triple scale that had Brix on one side. One degree Brix (bx) is equal to one gram of sucrose in 100grams of solution. I did my research and a fruit sorbet is ideal at around 25°bx. My sorbet needed to be chilled, the hydrometer is calibrated to 60°F so an ice bath was in order.

Once chilled appropriately I started measuring the sorbet. At first it was way too sweet, the hydrometer didn’t even sink low enough to get onto the scale. So water was added, just plain filtered water, nothing special. This took it to 30°bx, so I gradually added more water, stirring it in well and measuring after each addition to get it to 25°bx.

Once there I finished chilling it and then churned it. My research was correct, it churned beautifully and once fully frozen it scooped out like a dream.

I would have personally preferred less peach compared to the mango, but other reviews said it was perfect so maybe I’m just odd! Either way it turned out just as I hoped, light and refreshing and summery. What a wonderful way to spend an afternoon, sat in the sunshine with a scoop or two of this on hand.

Or What To Do When Your Brown Butter Ice Cream Refuses To Taste Like Brown Butter.

I was so looking forward to making the brown butter ice cream, it’s the one I had to have on the list when I was deciding what to make for this month. It’s light, delicate nutty flavour, smooth and rich. I even had some pecan tartlets on hand, they would complement each other perfectly.

It started like any other ice cream making session. I had my egg yolks and sugar in a bowl, whisked together. And I got my butter going in a small frying pan.

It took a long time, I went for the low-and-slow route for browning. It starts to change colour, it gains little flecks and it has the most amazing nutty aroma. It gets tempered into the eggs and then the ice cream is finished as usual. Strain right at the end to get all those flecks out. Then chill.

I gave it a quick taste before chilling, I was excited to see what it would be like. Nothing! Nada! Not a thing! All I could taste was that teeny tiny teaspoon of vanilla that had gone in there, nothing buttery or nutty at all. But, I didn’t worry, sometimes chilling can make the world of difference to a flavour. Maybe it just needed to be cold for the flavour to come out.

Fast forward to the next day. I take another taste. Still nothing. It’s vanilla ice cream. Albeit a really nice vanilla ice cream, the brown sugar and butter adding depths of flavour and richness. But not a single hint of brown butter.

Well, I can’t just leave it as vanilla, that’s no fun. So I think about ice creams that were on my “maybe” list. Hoky Pokey comes jumping out.

Hokey Pokey (not the song.. which is the hokey cokey to all you Brits out there) is vanilla ice cream with honeycomb in it. Not honeycomb as in from bees, but the candy. Ever had a Crunchie bar (you’ll see them in the imported food isle), no? Well, honeycomb candy is caramelised sugar that you trap carbon dioxide bubbles in, forming a light airy crisp, caramel-y wonderfulness! It’s called honeycomb because the bubbles give it the look of, well, honeycomb (apparently it can also be known as sponge toffee).

Apparently this is a popular flavour in New Zealand, and I recall finding it in some ice cream parlours in the UK. Hokey Pokey was a generic term for the street ice cream vendors in the 19th to early 20th century in England and also New York. I also hear tell that Hokey Pokey is a Cornish term for honeycomb.

Thankfully honeycomb doesn’t take long to whip up (the vital stages come and go quick though, so only photos of the finished article), just boil the sugar and honey with a dash of water to 300F. Then stir in baking soda. It rises alarmingly and you actually want to gently knock it back a little or it will become too airy and collapse. Of course knocking it back too much leaves you with a slab of hard caramel. Pour it out on a tray, greased parchment will do, but any excuse for me to get my trusty silpat out! Leave it to set. It really doesn’t take long. I left it an hour as I pottered about do other bits and pieces, 30 minutes would have done the trick.

Then break it up into pieces. I went for smallish chunks and doing that gave me plenty of crumbs too.

Once the ice cream is churned fold in the chunks and all the crumbs and leave to freeze.

The honeycomb loses some its crispness frozen in the ice cream, except for some of the larger chunks. But finding the pockets of it makes for fun eating. Those crumbs spread throughout the mix adding a nice overall flavour to the ice cream.

Who doesn’t love a glass of “bubbly” to celebrate?.. Well, actually, I don’t, I find it too dry. This wonderful sorbet however adds sugar to the mix making it sweeter, much more palatable.

True champagne comes from the Champagne region of France, however American laws aren’t as strict as the French so any sparkling wine can be labelled as champagne.

Champagne is made from a blend of chardonnay, pinot noir, or pinot blanc grapes. Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon, celler master at the Abbey of Hautvillers until 1715, was credited for his work in the blending of champagnes and prevention of bottle explosion from carbonation by using thicker bottles and better corks. He did however consider the presence of bubbles a fault and spent his life trying to reduce their occurrence. He believed that pinot noir grapes gave the best flavour and by limiting the contact with the skin of the grapes helped him to produce white wine from red grapes.

In 1662, the English scientist Christopher Merret presented a paper detailing how the presence of sugar in a wine led to it sparkling, and that nearly any wine could be made to sparkle by adding sugar before bottling. This is one of the first known accounts of someone understanding the process of creating sparkling wine and suggests that British merchants were producing “sparkling Champagne” even before the French Champenois were deliberately making it.

Following the death of Louis XIV in 1715, his nephew Philippe II, the Duke of Orléans became the Regent of France. The Duke  enjoyed the sparkling Champagne and featured it at his nightly petits soupers at the Palais-Royal. This sparked a craze in Paris as everyone sought to emulate the Duke’s tastes.

Since then champagne has had it’s ups and downs but it still remains central to many celebrations today.

This sorbet was remarkably easy to make. I made a simple syrup (equal quantities of sugar and water) and then added it to a bottle of champagne. Chilled overnight (more for convenience than necessity, just chill it down however fast or slow you like) and then churned.

It had a soft texture, it melted very quickly, a sign of too much alcohol. Not too much however as it did churn and freeze beautifully.

It had a very light and refreshing taste, perfect for the summer, the flavour a blend of dry and sweet at the same time.

I was never a fan of rum raisin ice cream as a child, I couldn’t tell you why.. I don’t remember it having a strong rum flavour, but maybe I remember wrong as that would certainly explain it.. For some unknown reason it took me til my twenties (don’t forget, it’s legal to drink from 18 in England) to find rum appealing.

I can’t find anything that will tell me when rum raisin ice cream came into being, who had that spark of genius. The internet tells me that when Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 he had his first meal of freedom with Bishop Tutu, the dessert was rum raisin ice cream. It also tells me that the Haagen Dazs rum raisin contains little to no alcohol.

My recipe did.. oh boy did my ice cream contain alcohol!

I failed to plan ahead and get my raisins soaking overnight, so I put the rum and raisins in a pan and heated them to just below boiling and then turned the heat off. Left to sit for an hour or so  in warm rum the raisins will soak it all up and get wonderfully plump and juicy.

I didn’t do a standard vanilla custard, I swapped out the sugar for brown sugar to give it a deeper flavour. A little bit more rum got added to the custard too, I’m not cooking it out!

Churned like usual I folded the raisins in as I transferred it to it’s freezer container.

This was a fun ice cream, you could smell the rum as you lifted the spoon to your mouth. The custard didn’t have a strong rum flavour, just a little warmth if you ate a lot of it. But the raisins… ooh the raisins. Little pockets that burst and emptied rum into your mouth as you ate them, they were divine!

I am definitely a fan of rum raisin ice cream now I’m all grown up!

I decided an ice cream and a sorbet a week seemed a good balance. So today is the day of the sorbet. This flavour was mostly decided on the fact that I gained a new book on ice creams and we had some strawberries in the freezer. Yes, it would be great to use fresh, but we had frozen so frozen it was, and it didn’t seem to hurt it in any way.

Strawberry and balsamic have an interesting relationship. They complement each other, they really do. It was a pairing I had heard about for a while but never tried.. Michael thought I was a loon and they would never work together. But I was determined and made it anyway.

The strawberries were mixed with a simple syrup and the balsamic vinegar and then blended together, strained and chilled. I couldn’t taste the balsamic at this point but left it until it had chilled.

Just before churning I still couldn’t taste the balsamic so I started adding more, and then some more. The balsamic has a very odd effect, it makes the strawberries taste ever more like strawberries, like super intense berries! Then giving a mild kick at the end. It smelt a lot stronger than it tasted so your mind told you it was going to be really balsamic-y and instead you just got super strawberry.

A few minutes into churning the recipe called for egg whites to be added… it apparently helps stabilise and emulsify the sorbet improving the texture.. It seemed to work the day after, even a couple days after. But a week after and the sorbet seemed icier than I would usually expect, I don’t know if the egg whites had anything to do with that.

Obviously, we served it with fresh strawberries, a few splashes of balsamic over it is a nice garnish too.

Most of our taste testers approached this one with caution, like Michael they hadn’t heard of strawberry and balsamic being paired together. We got good reviews though, everyone was surprised at how intense the strawberry flavour was thanks to the balsamic. A few people would have liked to see more of a kick at the end, maybe that’s something your guests can add themselves, garnishing with balsamic to the level they like it, not everyone wants that kick at the end, finding it strong, and in some cases just plain confusing to taste in a dessert.