They say Rock’n’Roll Legends never die, they just turn into ice cream. Or something like that. It’s so easy to get enthralled by rock stars, with their cornsilk hair that’s all scraggly from it being Autumn and corn season being almost over. I mean, if you’re just a sweet young thing named Vidalia, just a garden variety girl, you might just roll right over when a rock star with a peaches and cream ice cream complexion says you’ve got great skin too. Don’t fret darlin/you’ve got a fun one/I’m the dessert/to your sexy onion. Don’t worry, when I shred, it won’t be you. RIP Eddie Van Halen.
If you were buried in brownies, would you dig yourself out, or just open your mouth and get there when you get there? If you were an ice cream zombie, you might not even have a mouth, or it might be something like a licorice whip that’s not really practical for eating. Besides, you want the taste of ice cream people, not brownies. But you’d definitely go for the fashionable chocolate chip cookie headstone. Think of all the visitors you’d get, many of whom are probably going to get close enough to grab. When I feel the icy fingers of an ice cream zombie around my ankle, I scream. Because I probably spilled my dessert. That’s the scariest of all.
When a vampire wakes up after a long day’s rest, they’re typically pretty logey. Some keep a nice drinkbox of blood next to the coffin for that evening pick-me-up, some go and grab themselves a fresh barista right away, and some have made the big leap to coffee-based coffins. The truly savvy modern vampire has their coffins made entirely out of coffee ice cream, because it’s nice and cool in the crypt. The coffee crypt. How do you like your coffee? This crypt has a visitor in the form of a spooky ghost. Ghosts need caffeine too. They like capp-boo-chinos. Your Dad laughed.
For the longest time, I thought chickens used to be eggs. There was a whole ‘which came first’ conundrum, that left me really scratching my head. When I later smartened up, I realized that chickens actually used to be dinosaurs. I’ve saved a lot of time and trouble since, and have also learned to avoid people in chicken suits too. They’re just as scary as a dinosaur in feathers. I mean, who goes looking for dinosaurs? Explorers maybe. If they were to stumble into some sort of Jurassice cream park, they might find a roasted corn Brontosaurus, a Stegos’morus, a peaches and cream Triceratops, and a peach basil Tyrannosorbet Rex. Not me, it’s too scary. I’m just going to keep an eye on all these chickens.
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!
Our plastic Chameleon was the life of the party, but we forgot to feed him… ever… and now he’s just a plastic skeleton. Too bad for him, he only blends in on Hallowe’en. We had a party for him, with some delicious ice cream canapes. I hope he wasn’t offended that they were shaped like eyeballs. Like the eyes he used to have, they went around and around the room until they were gone. Snapped up like flies by some sort of lizard. The eyeballs are an assortment of peach basil, roasted corn, peaches and cream and s’mores ice creams, with chocolate and butterscotch chips as pupils.
Hey Ice Cream Club! Did you ever feel like you’re lost in an implacable, endless dessert? Like a huge cheesecake? Or maybe a gigantic bowl of cheesecake ice cream? If that sounds corny, it is. I took that corn, roasted it, and made ice cream out of it. And then I made skulls out of that roasted corn ice cream and headed out into the dessert. I didn’t find an oasis, but I encountered a whole lot of crumbled graham cracker sand and rocks. It was very spooky also. Here’s the photos from my trip!
Hey Ice Cream Club! I was just investigating the Slimer Mansion with the toy Ghostbusters. As one does. There was rumour of ice cream ghosts about, and we found one… or rather one found us! It’s a peaches and cream ice cream ghost, with macerated peach chunks in a vanilla ice cream base. The Slimer portrait is courtesy of artist c.happycandy. So spooky!
Hey there Ice Cream Club! I’m doing some spooky Ice Creams and some spookier photos all month! Here’s my first entry, a peach-basil sorbet pumpkin patch. I used molds for the pumpkins, and parsley for all the foliage. Have a spooky October!
Hey there Ice Cream Club! Aren’t you awesome! You’re peachy keen, and so is a batch of sorbet I just made. It’s peach basil (again! How tedious!) and I’m doing some fun shapes for the coming week using silicone molds. I’m going to try and up my photo game for the month leading up to Hallowe’en. We’ll see how I do!
You may have seen some fun dinosaur shapes that I’ve done. It seems a little ridiculous to have to do Ice Cream or Sorbet in a shape to increase the fun factor. Aren’t they super fun already? If you’ve ever stood in front of an open freezer with a carton and a spoon, you know how little you need a dinosaur shape for that cold fix. Scarface the Peach/Pear T-Rex here is in a battle for ultimate frozen supremacy with Spike the Stegosorbet.
The Peach Pear combo is pretty good. Subtle and not too sweet. Both local. I wish you could taste them.
Scarface is gonna get a taste of Spike.
Chomp! Delicious! But of course you can’t taste what I’ve made, and you can only take my word for it, so some visual jazz is totally called for. Vanilla Ice Cream even has the catch-all for unremarkable in its name. I remember seeing a Just For Laughs Gags show years ago, a public prank show set in Montreal, and the pranksters had a free Vanilla Ice Cream giveaway at a little cart in a park. The twist? It was lard.
Soooo maybe part of what makes a fantastic sundae a fantastic sundae is a little bit of spectacle. So you know it’s dessert instead of lard and oyster sauce, or cold mashed potatoes and gravy. Gross!
I’m all for adding things to Vanilla Ice Creams, which serves as my base for most of my mixes. This week I made a batch of Cookies and Cream with chocolate bark pieces. Very decadent, and an easy hit. I made the bark by melting chocolate chips over a double boiler, then pouring it out onto a silpat and then letting it harden in the freezer. I find the texture of chocolate chips, as wonderful as they are, kinda weird in ice cream. They tend to be brittle and a bit sharp. The bigger, more toothsome pieces of bark are somehow more friendly, even when they have a bit of a point to them. Maybe it’s the intense chocolate flavour they enable. Kind of like a nice big section of a quality chocolate bar. The kind you’d use for S’mores.
Last week I wrote about my plans to make S’mores Ice Cream, and while those are still on tap, the peaches jumped to the front of the queue. While I’d love to have some sweet local fruits, the only available ones at the store I went to were from California or Washington State. Those are a bit of a risk, because they’ve been on a truck for who knows how long, and might have been picked before they could develop a proper sweetness.
Lucky me, the white peaches from Washington that I bought were nice and sweet. My roommate cut them up and macerated them for me with some sugar, lemon juice and a little Limoncello. I added some lovely local basil, pureed the whole mix, and then churned it after a bit of a chillout in the fridge. I did this same recipe recently and it was a huge hit then too. I highly recommend it.
I have a couple peaches left for another stab at Peaches and Cream Ice Cream with a vanilla base. And I do intend to make that S’mores Ice Cream. Maybe I’ll do a whole post about it. It’s amazing how much vanilla I go through. I just made an Angel Food cake because I reached the magic number of 12 egg whites (I use the yolks for the custard base in my ice creams), and I can smell the scent of baked vanilla in the air. Wonderful.
Speaking of in the air, this was also the week I finally got a bird feeder. Two, actually. One squirrel-proof seed station for the songbirds, and one Mason jar nectarpot for the hummingbirds. I set them up outside the window, and it’s been bird theatre every day since. I bet the hummingbirds would love sorbet.
There’s only so many times a hummingbird can fly up to your window and look in inquisitively before you have to put nectar out. They don’t guilt you so much as matter-of-factly point out your capacity for nectar. I got a powder. If I can make Kool-Aid, I can feed the birds.
I think that’s about it for me this week, Ice Cream Club. There’s only so much more late summer produce left before the winter, and the Ice Creams start to resemble warm things, like pumpkin spice, apple pie, and mulled cider. I’m looking forward to the last of the summer, the best of the Fall, and all the bird drama. Cheep thrills. Apparently they used to be dinosaurs.
Thanks for reading, and watch out this week. I have plans for a special October that should be chock full of goodies for the eyes and the imagination. Hopefully it’ll be fun and spooky and delicious. Like you! Have a great week Ice Cream Club. Your life matters! Black Lives Matter!
The Ice Cream Club 