Let’s make some ice cream!

What’s more fun than making ice cream every day? Making two flavors with a friend!

Lora came over Tuesday night and brought her ice cream maker so we could crank out not one, but two ice creams! It was so fun that I completely forgot to take pictures until the very end. We also chose two pretty complicated ice cream flavors to make, thus the small amount of concentration that was not used in ice cream-crafting was used to catch up.

Lora suffered the same fate of all who visit me, getting lost. My apartment seems to be hidden by an invisible force field that leads people in the wrong direction away from my house. After a few wrong turns, Lora made it to my apartment and we started our ice cream making.

First, we made Scarlet and Earl Grey. This mixes Earl Grey (a black tea) ice cream with sugar-plumped cherries. I made a simple syrup that was poured over the cherries and left to cool to room temperature before Lora arrived.

We measured, mixed, boiled, and stirred the ingredients together and then let the strong tea steep in the cream while we made butterscotch sauce. The sauce for our second ice cream, Gooey Butter Cake, had simple ingredients but complicated instructions. This was the most tense part of the evening while we waited for the mixture to froth, form “glassine” bubbles (not even joking!), turn dark, burn a little bit but not burn too much before we could add the cream which I almost forgot to have ready and had to run to the fridge to measure out in order to add it at the exact, right moment. But we made it and it was beautiful and delicious.

This mixture was poured over pieces of cake that I had made over the weekend while dog sitting. The cake soaked up all the gooey butterscotch while we strained the earl grey ice cream and cooked the base for our second ice cream. Then we left the custard’s in an ice bath and sat outside in my garden (which is on the verge of becoming a jungle) under strings of glass bulb lights. We chatted while the breeze kept us cool and the air conditioner drowned out our conversation.

We spun the ice cream, talked some more, and were rewarded with…

plumped, sweet cherries that we layered into the creamy Earl Grey ice cream,

smooth butter ice cream that we mixed syrupy cake into,

and ice cream-lined freezer bowls that we scraped clean and ate.

Lora gave me permission to report that the ice creams were so good that she inadvertently drooled into the ice cream bowl while scraping out the last spoonful. It was so good we didn’t want to waste a drop.

Coming up on Friday…Sweet Basil and Honeyed Pine Nuts.