Hey there Ice Cream Club! It’s been a wacky, busy little stretch, and I’m finally able to sit down an try and encapsulate some of it for the blog. First of all:
I shot this footage over the past weekend, and my partner in video production, Ramiro Cuenca, edited it and added the music. Hummingbirds are awesome! Please share, and consider getting a feeder of your own.
I have had a bit of a career in film, and am branching out beyond acting into a writer/director/producer role. Still acting, though. Our little studio had a recent accolade as our 100 Hour Film Race film, Your Top 3, placed in the Top 10 of that competition.
We’re doing other things, too, including stop motion and green-screen based stuff. I’m hoping that not only will we produce quality content that showcases us and our ideas, we’ll show our development and process in a way that can benefit others like us.
In the world of ice cream, I’ve made a few notables, although like you can see in the hummingbird video, we’ve had some winter. I know people love it, but I’d rather not make much when it’s cold out.
Recently, I made several versions of cookies’n’cream and a vanilla. Pretty exciting, no? The vanilla was a request I get occasionally. Add those all up and it’s actually a really popular flavour. The cookies and cream tried several of the festive Oreos that pop up around the holidays. The Coconut Caramel Oreos were the standouts, for sure. They were great just as cookies. The reviewer in that article gushes a lot about them, and IMHO, they’re the best Oreos I’ve ever had.
A recipe that I’ve made a lot recently, and has had several requests, is lemon with cookies. It’s a standard cookies and cream ice cream, but with golden (aka plain) sandwich cookies instead of chocolate. As well, I substituted a teaspoon of lemon extract for my regular teaspoon of vanilla and it really worked out.
Another recent request was for chocolate cherry ice cream. It was for the actress in the above film, Your Top 3, Olivia, who played Vanda Black. We try to come up with fun names for characters, especially those with only a little screen time. It was my pleasure to give her a duo of chocolate cherry ice creams, one with a chocolate base and a cherry compote, and the second with a cherry vanilla base and dark chocolate chunks.
I used grocery store frozen dark sweet cherries, which are still pretty awesome, and ended up using several kinds of dark chocolate, including 40%, 70% and 90%. If I could do it over, I would have left the compote more chunky, and maybe added some whole cherries as well. Here’s my basic recipe. These days I’ve been using a whole 1L of 33% and a 1L of 10% creamo to make 2 batches instead of using any milk at all.
For chocolate, I’ve had a lot success simply adding bits of the bars or chips to my sugar/milk mixture before I add the egg yolks. I’ve melted the chocolate over a double boiler occasionally, which works a little better, but rarely enough to make a difference with grocery store chocolate. Cocoa is an option, but works differently and produces a cocoa flavour that not everybody associates with chocolate.
Speaking of chocolate, I also used up some of my supply of ruby chocolate, and made some pink pretzel ice cream. I melted the ruby chocolate down (in a double boiler) and then used it to coat a bunch of semi-broken-up pretzel sticks. They were semi-broken on purpose to fit easier in the mouth. More than anything, I was trying to keep the pretzels crunchy in the freezer amid a moist, frozen dairy product. A chocolate coating is the only thing I’ve found so far that will stand up. Sugar dissolves. Baked goods crumble or go to mush. Chocolate, as usual, is the answer.
The ice cream was good but not great. It was in the same timeframe as lemon and cookies and the chocolate cherry duo, so the odds were against it. But like the chocolate coating, it held up okay. Thicker next time, to really show off the chocolate.
That’s all the time I have today, Ice Cream Club, but you sure are fabulous! Keep it up! This year’s off to a pretty good start, it would seem, and you’re a big reason why! Thanks for reading. Your life matters! Black Lives Matter!
The Ice Cream Club 