Canapes! Clockwise from top: saffron, roasted hazelnut with nutella, and mocha ice creams on gluten free cookie bases.
I make my own ice cream, and I have for years now. I have made it in dozens of different ways, using all sorts of ingredients and techniques. I have made it for friends, for co-workers, and for a couple of charitable fundraisers. While I love it, I’m not sure I could make a whole career out of it. I’d rather make it for fun and friends and fundraisers, and write about the process. A pair of venn diagrams below explain in visual form how I’d like ice cream to be positioned in my life.
This is ideal. Not the comparative size of the stress, but the separation between the two circlesThis is bad. See the yucky green? And the question marks? Terrible
I try to minimize stress. It tastes terrible. I don’t want it in my ice cream. Making ice cream can be stressful. Whether you have a hard deadline, a hot day, or someone to impress, stress can get in your mix. The easiest way to avoid such stress is to get comfortable with the processes involved in making ice cream. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out tips and tricks to make ice cream easier for myself.
Cranberry and brie ice cream
The name Ice Cream Club comes from an actual club I maintained at a former workplace of mine. The Club had open membership, no cost, and a semi-weekly newsletter. The newsletter would detail what ice creams I had brought in for club members to try. I made a ton of ice cream this way, and a wide variety of flavours. I had nearly 70 members in the Club at its peak, and many of those gave me regular feedback. I really enjoyed doing it, and amazingly, didn’t spend much doing it. If you are a keener who wants to experiment, someone who wants a regular few flavours in the freezer all the time, or part of a hungry, demanding family, a lot of the information in this blog will help you. Ice cream only looks hard. If you do it right, it’s actually quite scoopable!
So close you can almost taste it! This scoop is Carrot Cake Oreo cookie ice cream
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!
How does one please a witch? Witch, please! Give her a cool cauldron full of ice cream, and while you’re at it, some ice cream witch hats would be nice. Cover them in chocolate for that little extra something something. Maybe some curious curios, and maybe some fun specimens that she could portion into a potion, or maybe a lotion. Flowers are a no-no, because she might be allergic, and coffin and snifflin is for the vampires. Always be cool, like sorbet, and when you ask her what her first choice for a date is, and she says, ‘Hallowe’en,’ say, ‘mine too.’ She’ll make room on the broom.
When I won the assortment of bats from Louisville Slugger, I just assumed they’d be the 28 oz, 30″ variety, and not the sort that gets in your hair. I eventually lost the hair, but the bats never left.
Hey there Ice Cream Club! Sometimes I think I should be Sorbet Club. There have been weeks where I made nothing but sorbets, mostly because I got hold of a watermelon. Watermelons are an excellent base for sorbets, and I use them as much as possible. When I make a watermelon sorbet base, I simply puree watermelon and add a small amount of simple syrup made of sugar and water. I’ve substituted cane sugar syrup for the sugar with great results, too.
The sorbet I made this week added a couple of extra dimensions. First, I added fresh mint. Full disclosure, I hate fresh mint. I also love cilantro, which I think is the tradeoff. But other people in my life love fresh mint. Most if not all of them. I used about a handful, and it was what I’d use again.
Second, I made the simple syrup with some frozen cranberries I got for Thanksgiving. It added a nice tart little kick. Finally, I added a whole cucumber. I peeled it and removed the seeds, and then pureed it with the melon. It produced a really nice mix, and worked great in my Hallowe’en molds.
For Day 11, I made a gothy shrine, with some hearts and roses. These are all made of the sorbet. My roommate added some accessories and fabric, and we have candles to spare. There’s a painting in the background of several of the pictures, which is something I painted.
For Day 12, I used the same sorbet in a couple of different witch hat molds. Probably not my best work. The hat molds are cute, and I’m looking to do them again. We have this weird little toy rat with a skull on its head that sits near our front door. It’s one of many things that are just here, without much explanation.
On Day 13, today, I did fun spiders. Everyone loves fun spiders! What are they made of? The same sorbet. I actually wanted to use the spiders pictured as my backups, or as a rival breed to what I intended to be the stars of the pic: some chocolate coated ice cream spiders. I put a thin layer of chocolate in the spider molds, and then filled them with a new flavour: lemon cranberry. I’ll get to the flavour, and will likely have it show up in pictures in the coming week, but the spiders were either not frozen enough, too thin on the chocolate, removed badly, or in need of a fully sealed chocolate coat. Because none of them made it out of the mold intact. I had to eat them all.
At least the ice cream was super good. I’ve enjoyed messing around with some alternatives to vanilla extract in my basic recipe, and this time I tried lemon extract. I took a gamble and did a 1 for 1 sub, using a teaspoon of lemon extract, and it paid off. The ice cream tasted amazing. I also did a really jammy cranberry coulis, which I mixed in right after churning. It added a fun texture, and a little extra bit of tartness, but most of all, it gave the ice cream a cool pinkish ripple. I was really hoping that pinkish white colour would spill out of a squished or chopped chocolate spider, at least on camera, not directly out of the mold. Maybe with some more practice.
I’m going to wrap it up quick, Ice Cream Club. I’ve been doing some creative writing this week too, and my fingers are tired. I do have plans to make a few ice creams this week, and have my eye on pumpkin spice, mocha, and some little boxes of smarties I’ve got. I’ve also got some ruby chocolate left, and I’m dying to use it in the molds. Cross your fingers for me, and maybe put another scoop in your bowl for me too! Thanks for reading! Your life matters! Black Lives Matter!
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider. It was made of ice cream, and felt cool inside her. She enjoyed the feel of it’s cold dessert legs, but what she didn’t know was about the eggs. For days and days she felt obscure, and turned to the web to find a cure. Only part way through did she realize, that the web she’d made was full of flies. She felt completely ill at ease, as her eight eyes looked at her eight knees. The sugar, eggs, cream and milk… she’d ate had now turned into silk. She went to find her old geezer, and tied him up inside the freezer. She left to find the nearest kid, but forgot to webify the lid. That’s how you know this tale you see, because that old iced pop was me. I climbed out and got away, and lived to geeze another day. Where’s the old gal now? I hope you find her… I know her profile’s up on Tinder.
I blame the improv classes I took. They taught me, over and over again, that the foundation of good improv is ‘Yes, and…’ and even though that seemed a little simplistic, I repeated it until the words rang in my head all day. The problem wasn’t the application to improv, it was real life. I was out with my new girlfriend shopping. It was near Hallowe’en. We were looking at a display of hats. Some were seasonal, some were more general. She turned to me and asked, ‘Which hat?’ and before I could think of anything else, I blurted out, ‘Yes, and…!’ She smiled. Then she asked, ‘Which socks?’ ‘which broom?’ and ‘which cauldron?’ Then she made me pay for everything. It was like I was under some kind of a spell. Maybe I should have known. She did take me out to shop for hats and socks and brooms and cauldrons and eye of newt and a new toad familiar. But just in case, I’m going to blame it on the improv classes.
One of the greatest accomplishments in most men’s lives is managing to impress a Goth Girl. While one might master the language of whalebone and crinoline, and the difference between royal velvet, back alley velour, and endless shame, it still might not be enough. I tried once, and failed. The dates in the cemetery were nice, and my Nightmare Before Christmas socks went over very well, but we just didn’t mesh. What it ultimately came down to was our taste in poetry: she loved iambic pentameter, and I just put my foot in my mouth a lot. Eventually she just gave me the boot, and not any of the ones I’d hoped for. I built a shrine for her, knowing that the only way to her cold heart was a display of frozen hearts and roses, made of watermelon cucumber mint cranberry sorbet. Something simple, to roll off the tongue. She’ll come crawling back, and I’ve got my ear to where I boarded up the floor for when she does.
Hey there Ice Cream Club. If you’re Canadian, like me, you may have what’s known as a ‘turkey hangover.’ Mine is running a few days now. Soon I’ll have a turkey sandwich for lunch, then make a stock using the carcass from the turkey, and then eat some squash soup using the stock for dinner. See you again tomorrow, hangover.
I really enjoy the Thanksgiving dinner, including and especially the preparation. I like making the turkey and the stuffing, and this year I also did gravy and cranberry sauce. I prefer simple and classic, after some mediocre results from things like bacon wraps and cornbread stuffings over the years. The turkey was brined for a day in salted water with some peppercorns, then given an olive oil massage before the oven. That’s all. It was a little over, but super tasty with perfect skin. Everything we all want to be.
The stuffing was white bread with bacon, onions, celery and some sage. The cranberry sauce was cranberries, water, sugar and some balsamic vinegar. I hard fried the giblets, added butter’n’drippins, strained it out, and then added a packet of seasoning for the gravy. I’ve done a jus-style/roux-style split in the past, when the first is basically drippins and the latter also gets some flour to thicken it out, but the packet was gluten-free and they usually go over pretty well. It was good.
My Roommates made the potatoes and added some salad, our guests brought a caesar salad and some extra veggies, and we all had ice cream for dessert. I’m really thankful for the meal and the people I got to share it with. It was awesome. We’ll probably do it again in November, in large part because it’s really cheap compared to how much food you get.
In the meantime, I’m trying to slog through the hangover and get going on making some more Hallowe’en-themed ice cream pictures for October. The ones from the previous week involved some highs and lows.
Day 5 involved all my dinosaur molds. I’ve been consistently impressed with how well anything I put in these molds holds details. When I made all of the batches that I made into dinosaurs, I put some into one of the four molds so that I’d have four different kinds when I did the dino day. I’ve done the dinos a lot, and it’s unlikely I’ll do more than one more. They’re kind of borderline Hallowe’en anyway.
On Day 6, I did the Coffee Crypt, which worked really well. For the coffee ice cream, I made a standard vanilla base, used some liqueur instead of vanilla for a less pronounced flavour, and then added several Starbucks Via sachets right before churning. I’m not sure that adding the coffee then is best, but coffee is better when it’s fresh as a rule of thumb. It works well, so I’m going to keep doing it that way. I used instant coffee because that’s pretty much the only way. Adding any water to ice cream upsets the balance, and most of coffee is water. Even espresso shots add too much. I’m sure any instant coffee would work, but the Via sachets are pretty good quality and don’t have any extra flavours and sugar and stuff that I’d rather not add. Stuff like roasted hazelnuts and cookies go well as additions to the coffee ice creams. To get the coffin shape, I used a cookie cutter. I covered the bottom with cling film to contain the ice cream, which also helped me push it out of the mold. For the rocks/fallen debris, I used a silicon bar mold that doesn’t produce bars well with soft ice creams. It makes terrific chunks, though.
Day 7 produced a little gravesite with some emerging Zombies. Except for the vegetable matter, this would make a fine party dessert for some kids. I remember ‘worms in dirt’ being big when I was young. That was chocolate pudding with cookie crumbs and gummy worms. This is brownies crumbled for the dirt, some chocolate chip cookies for the headstones, and then several ice creams that were frozen into hemispherical molds. I use those a lot, and put some of every batch into them. I’m really pleased with the eyes, which are marshmallow slices and chocolate chips with the tops sliced off. It was finicky work, but worth it. Cutting the marshmallows with a chef’s knife worked out well, because the weight pushed the slices into a more eye-like shape.
On Day 8, the vegetable usage was kicked up a notch, in part because of a weird story about sexy onions. I had a really good skull from the peaches and cream batch of ice cream, and decided to use some corn silk to make some scraggly locks. Eddie Van Halen died earlier in the week, and a tribute to rock legends seemed appropriate. We have some wacky musical instruments kicking around the apartment, and a couple of those featured heavily in the photos. I got my Roommate to make the little onion tart as a nod to the news story, and to give our rock star an adoring fan. I don’t think onions have a place in ice cream, and any equipment used to make any might always make onion ice creams afterwards. That being said, I would love to make some batches based on traditionally cold soups like Gazpacho and Vichyssoise. Who knows, they could be amazing.
On Day 9, the results were a little spotty all around. I made a fresh corn ice cream mix, but something went wrong and there was a very sour element in it that I’m pretty sure is spoiled dairy. We’ve had some milk go off long before the expiry date recently. Not much, but some. I was still able to use a bit of the mix in the picture above. I’ve been watching a lot of Halloween food competitions, and a staple move of the sugar artists is to make isomalt eyes that look fairly real by layering different colours of sugar under a translucent dome. I tried that here with ice in the hemisphere molds. I put a little measuring spoon in the water before freezing it to give me a big empty cavity in the ice. I then put a chocolate chip in the cavity and filled it with a little of the corn mix. I’m actually pretty happy with the result, although 4 out of the 6 eyes I made were unusable because the cavity was too shallow. In the picture we were going for a ‘Children of the Corn’ thing, but the eyes look like mantis eyes, and the corn husks never really stood up in a convincing way.
Finally, on Day 10, I constructed a well of sorts using graham crackers, then used another ice cream hemisphere from the stock for a head, more cornsilk for the hair, chocolate chips for the eyes, kale and parsley for the foliage, and the centre of a sandwich cookie for the hand. I like this one a lot.
So hangover or no, I feel compelled to continue and make more spooky ice creams for the rest of October. Starting tonight. The one thing we didn’t get to in the Thanksgiving dinner was a quarter watermelon brought by one of our esteemed guests. It will be a lovely sorbet, likely with cucumber and mint. Like a melon mojito.
It is the custom of Thanksgiving to give thanks. Even Zombies know that. So thank you for reading! I hope my words go down as well as my ice creams have, and I look forward to making many more. Thanks. Your life matters! Black Lives Matter!
Well, well, well. It’s a hazard, that’s what it is. The well. The construct of graham crackers that we built around that deep dark hole we found, that we assumed had water in it somewhere. Or maybe better than water. Wishes. I was watching this old VHS tape we found nearby the deep dark hole, and this delightful girl with a complexion like a nice, corn ice cream, and long stringy hair like not-so-fresh cornsilk climbed backwards out of a mirror and told me that I’d find some wishes in the well. I just had to toss something valuable down there. I thought about it, then just ate my ice cream instead.
It’s become more and more common to find a large disclaimer notice outside seasonal corn mazes, reminding parents of the obvious dangers lurking within. The worst of these are the all-too-common nursery rhyme songbooks that are strewn all over the darkest paths of these mazes. Children become absorbed in these books, and cannot help but wander into the corn and sing nursery rhymes for hours and hours, until their parents give up and are forced to leave. Such children wander along through the fields, singsong voices raised in a soft, gentle chorus that some find maddening, and others terrifying. But it’s just distracted kids, reading, singing and learning about corn. And all they want is for you to join them in the maize.
The Ice Cream Club 