Hey there Ice Cream Club! The weather’s getting cool, but it’s not as cool as you! Hallowe’en and the season of scary is upon us. Did you ever chant ‘I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!’ when you were a kid? How about just now? That clever phrase is the inspiration for an October project for me, and that’s making some seriously spooky ice creams!
I’m a few days in already, and have some pretty cool pics up. I’ll talk a little about the ice creams I made and some of the lessons I’ve learned as I go. First up was a cool pumpkin patch made up of peach basil sorbet pumpkins.
I’ve done the flavour before, which is made of peaches macerated in sugar, lemon juice and a little splash of Limoncello. The peaches are blended with fresh basil and maybe a little water if it needs it, then the mix is churned. I’ve been collecting silicone molds for a while now, and have a few shapes to work with. I’ve got a bunch of Hallowe’en themed molds that you’ll see throughout the month, and some basics. I’ve got several sizes of hemisphere, and the flattened sphere shape that is the smallest pumpkin size. I’ve been freezing every flavour in these molds and stocking them up.
My roommate and I used parsley as foliage for the pumpkin patch. We took the parsley stems and pulled a single ‘branch’ to produce the little curls, and chopped some of the thicker stems to make the pumpkin stems.
On day 2, I did a peaches and cream ice cream ghost, in a toy brick mansion. There are multiple brands even if it looks like it’s all a particular kind of brick. The ghost did really well in the mold, and held up well through the shoot, even under a hot light. You can sort of see the bricks that are propping it up, and the cellophane wrap keeping the bricks from getting melted ice cream on them.
The ghost is starting to melt here. Shout out to my roommate Charlene (aka c.happycandy on instagram) who painted the tiny portrait of Slimer the Ghost. Great choice of pose. The peaches were given a similar treatment to those in the peach basil sorbet, being macerated in sugar, lemon and a little Limoncello, but after being left to sit overnight, they were drained as best I could (keep the liquid and put it on cake). One of the secrets to adding things like fruit to your ice creams is to minimize the amount of water that comes with it. The entire process of making ice cream revolves around a consistent incorporation of ice crystals into the milk fat and sugars so that it’s smooth and creamy. Otherwise it’s a frozen block. Adding water skews the freezing process and creates uneven pockets of ice, which melt weird and aren’t smooth and creamy. With fruit, there’s almost always going to be some liquid, but it’s worth removing what you can. It’s very possible this extra water content helped the integrity of the ghost, and made it freeze a little harder.
Which was the opposite of what I experienced with the roasted corn ice cream in the graham cracker desert on day 3. I should have left it to freeze longer, but I got a little behind on things. The ice cream didn’t come out of the molds perfectly, including leaving the skull’s teeth behind. I was planning to give it some graham cracker dust on top anyway so it wasn’t an issue. This wasn’t the corniest ice cream, which was pretty disappointing. The first few times I did it, I used fresh corn within a day of purchase. This time, I had the corn for a couple of days, then roasted it. I blended both into the milk I’d be using for the ice cream, and left them to steep overnight. There was a major difference in both colour and flavour with the roasted corn. It was a little pale yellow and sweet, but nothing like the robust yellow and pronounced corniness of the fresh corn batches of previous years. I think I would go back to fresh next time. Maybe once more before the season ends.
Something I’ve noticed with the corn ice creams is an extra smoothness that I’ve attributed to the natural corn starch. While this is a really nice quality to have in an ice cream, it’s not great for molding. It’s tempting to add corn starch powder to ice cream to get a similar effect, but it’s a slippery slope of gummy and gunky, and it has a taste.
Today’s entry was an eleventh hour thing, because my original plan fell through. Someday, perhaps I’ll learn that for best results in molds, ice cream needs an overnight stay in the freezer. I had some hemispheres available, and knew I could get in at least one of the s’mores flavour before the end of the day.
Plastic animal skeletons are all the rage at the dollar stores this Hallowe’en, and we have a chameleon. I wish the tail was more of a curl but that’s probably tricky for the plastic animal skeleton factory to produce. I enjoy their efforts towards animals without bones, like centipedes and sharks.
Chameleons have big beautiful orbs for eyes, and that reminded me of the hemisphere molds I have. I’ve been using those molds to make canape-style ice cream portions for a few years now. Once you’ve filled the mold, you can gently press a cookie into the top and freeze the two together. Then when you pop the ice cream out of the mold, it has a nice cookie base you can serve it on, like a fancy, open-faced ice cream sandwich. I like making them one or two bites, so you get a good taste of the ice cream without eating too much. It’s ideal for sampling, or for a party atmosphere where everybody wants to try a lot of flavours and not have to hold a bowl, spoon or dripping cone.
The ice cream I made today, and just snuck into the photo (bottom two), is the long-awaited s’mores ice cream. Well, the most recent experiment. Previously, I’ve just put graham cracker crumble with chocolate chunks and marshmallows into a vanilla ice cream base, which was fine. But I’m trying to capture more of the elements of a s’more, including the heat and burnt sugar aspects. This time I started with a candy brittle, and added marshmallows, chocolate chips and graham crumble to it. Of course the marshmallows and chocolate melted immediately, and the whole thing turned into a ugly, lumpy mess. I spread it on a silpat and froze it for a while until it hardened, then chopped it up into chunks. The chunks are very good, but the dominant flavour is sugar. With the chocolate, it tastes like a honeycomb chocolate bar. Not a bad thing, but not really s’mores. I’ll reserve judgment until I taste the ice cream with the s’mores chunks together. I’m thinking next time of doing a rice-cereal-treat-style treatment with the graham crumble, and then adding chocolate chunks. And fitting a little black pepper in there somewhere too. Making a candy brittle was an interesting experience that I’ll happily add to my bag of tricks.
Well that’s about it for this week, Ice Cream Club. I’m on Twitter now, and back posting on instagram. I’m sure at some point I said I’d only join Twitter when Hell froze over. I guess I’ll have to start thinking about brimstone ice cream. Maybe even this week! Keep safe, be kind and don’t forget to vote! You life matters! Black Lives Matter!
The Ice Cream Club 