Champagne Caramel White Chocolate with Pop Rocks

If you’ve been following us at all over the last couple of years you know we love our seasonal and holiday flaves.  What better flavor to preface a New Years celebration than Champagne?  We knew a Champagne flavor would require some sort of fizz or pop to be fully realized, and that poses a challenge with ice cream since fizzy drinks don’t translate well frozen for a multitude of reasons.  We theorized Pop rocks would be a nice way to add the bubbly effect and we thought making our own would be the only right way to do it.  We found out that the homemade version of pop rocks doesn’t quite provide the sizzle we were looking for, so we were forced to turn to store bought Pop Rocks.  The end result was absolutely worth it.

Homemade pop rocks are made with baking soda and citric acid crystals in your candy to spur a chemical reaction which in turn creates a fizz.

Homemade Pop RocksHomemade Pop Rocks, process

We took a shot at making our own and were successful in practice, but the end result didn’t have the pop we wanted for the ice cream.  Real pop rocks are created by injecting CO2 into the candy at a high pressure and provide a much more dramatic “pop” than the home made version.  Since we don’t have the high pressure CO2, we hunted down the original.

 

Pop Rocks.  It still took some finagling to get them to a point where they would survive the ice cream bath without reacting and exploding before the ice cream was finished.  The answer was to coat them with chocolate to keep them from going off.  To pair with Champagne, we felt white chocolate was the right choice.

Pop Rocks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We reduced some organic white chocolate bars into a sauce and letting it cool to the point where we could coat the pop rocks entirely, in effect creating a “bark” that looked exactly like the candy cane bark I was used to my mom making as part of the Christmas cookie windfall.

White Chocolate

White Chocolate Pop Rock Bark

 

 

The bark was crushed into small chunks in preparation for being churned into the ice cream.

 

 

Next, the ice cream itself.  We reduced champagne into a caramel – and used the caramel to sweeten and flavor the ice cream, as well as for a caramel swirl.

ChampagneChampagne Caramel

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where did we end up?  A lightly champagne flavored ice cream rippled with a sweet champagne caramel and full of white chocolate coated pop rocks that sizzle and crack in your mouth.

Champagne Caramel White Chocolate

 

 

 

 

 

 
You can win one of the only two pints in the world, filled with this fabulous, scratch made craft ice cream in our weekly pint giveaway. Enter your name in the comments section here, or on our facebook page under the posted contest.  2 lucky winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 12/19 at 4pm.  Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

 

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Gløgg

Winter and the holidays are upon us, which got us thinking about seasonal beverages. We can safely say that our go to holiday beverage is a whiskey eggnog. As frozen brothers, we generally slurp one of these down during weekly meetings this time of year. It was a year ago that we released our Eggnog with Whiskey Caramel  ice cream. As for this week, we decided tohead back to our Scandinavian roots and work with a beverage that pretty much looks, smells, and tastes like the holidays. Gløgg! Let’s get started…

 

 

 

For those of you unfamiliar with gløgg, it is the Nordic version of mulled wine. It can be spelled many different ways, but staying true to our heritage, we decided to go with the Norwegian spelling. The variations of gløgg recipes are wide ranging, but two things it is certain to have are wine and spices. Our mulling blend above include cloves, cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks, raisins, almonds and orange zest.

 

 

 

PortPrimitivo Red Wine

Bandy and sugar
   

 

 

 

 

 

We add Port, red wine, and a simple syrup of brandy and sugar to the blend.

 

 

           

 

The wines and spices get simmered down with a cover on for about an hour and then the mulling spices get strained out with a sieve. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GløggGløgg Caramel

 

  

The finished gløgg is ready for sipping. The flavors are deep and complex, yet so simple. It wreaks of winter and holidays and conjures up nostalgia as it hits your lips. As for our ice cream, the gløgg gets reduced down to a syrupy consistency. Some of the reduction gets added right into our brown sugar ice cream base. The remaining gløgg reduction gets added into a traditional caramel we made with granulated sugar. The  gløgg caramel gets layered into our gløgg ice cream during packaging.

 

 

 

Gløgg      

 

 

The result is an über holiday ice cream – rich, creamy, and deep with flavors of mulled wine and spice. The perfect ice cream for a winter holiday evening.

 

 

You can win one of the only two pints in the world, filled with this fabulous, scratch made craft ice cream in our weekly pint giveaway. Enter your name in the comments section here, or on our facebook page under the posted contest.  2 lucky winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 12/19 at 4pm.  Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!   Facebook Twitter More...

Cardamom Fruitcake

Fruit Cake is constantly the butt of holiday gift giving jokes.  For years I heard about how supposedly terrible they were and had imagined this loaf to be some concoction of olives, yeast, nuts, dirt, grapes and cement.  The truth is a well made fruit cake is pretty darn good and we thought it would be more than appropriate for a holiday flavor. Fortunately for us, we found out about these amazing “Not Your Average” fruitcakes from Sun Street Breads and jumped at the chance to use them in a flavor.

 

 

These babies are chock full of almonds, figs, crystallized ginger, candied orange peel, bittersweet chocolate and are soaked in rum and aged for at least a month.

 

 

 

Seriously, are you on board yet?  They are dense, rich and absolutely wonderful in every sense of the word.  I for one, would be thrilled if one of these showed up in a package for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the ice cream we chose to use the fruit cake as-is – chopped up into smaller chunks.  It is so rich and dense with rum and sugar that we felt it would hold up in the ice cream perfectly without any extra help, and it did that to say the least.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We chose to pair it with a cardamom ice cream – one of our favorite spices that makes its presence most known around the holidays, especially in the desserts and cookies from our Norwegian heritage.  The cream is steeped with fresh ground cardamom while the mix is hot to infuse the cream with the bright, fruity flavor cardamom is known for.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To finish the fruitcake pieces are tossed into the cream mix while spinning in the maker.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The result is a bright, cardamom spiced ice cream decorated with dense chunks of fruit cake that give you a variety of nutty, fruity and chocolate-y bites, with the rum of the cake humming softly in the background all the while .

 

You can win one of the only two pints in the world, filled with this fabulous, scratch made craft ice cream in our weekly pint giveaway. Enter your name in the comments section here, or on our facebook page under the posted contest.  2 lucky winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 12/14 at 4pm.  Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

 

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Spiced Nuts

We’re continuing our holiday flavor tour this week with another nut infused ice cream. We got inspired back in October with our Black Walnut ice cream, and since, have been on a nut-infused ice cream making rampage. To go along with our holiday theme, we thought we would make a mixed bag and spice it up a little bit. After all, who doesn’t love a holiday party with a bowl of spiced nuts on the table? Let’s get this holiday party started right with this week’s flavor: Spiced Nuts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nuts! Raw nuts! From light to dark: Cashews, Almonds, Pecans. These make up the backbone of this flavor adding both rich flavors and creamy texture with all those natural nut oils.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First things first, nuts get laid out on a sheet pan and into the oven for a roast. The roasting brings out all those nutty flavors we are all familiar with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the roast, the nuts get crushed in the food processor, and then into our ice cream base for a hot steep. The mix gets chilled down in an ice bath and the crushed nuts get strained out, for a smooth nut cream base.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now that we have our nut-infused ice cream we can get down to putting some spice into those nuts. Shortly after conceiving the idea for this week’s flavor, the December issue of Food and Wine magazine showed up, and what was in it? A nice recipe for Sugar-and-Spice Nuts. We liked it so much that we decided to use the three spices used in the recipe to spice up our nut cream. Check the recipe out for yourselves right here: Sugar-and-Spice Nuts. In the picture above starting at the bottom, moving clockwise: Cayenne Pepper, Chili Powder and Cinnamon. The spices get mixed into our nut cream along with a generous salting. Into the maker for a churn.

 

 

 

 

The result is a rich creamy nut-infused ice cream with a salty sweet and ever-so-slightly spicy finish.

 

You can win one of the only two pints in the world, filled with this fabulous, scratch made craft ice cream in our weekly pint giveaway. Enter your name in the comments section here, or on our facebook page under the posted contest.  2 lucky winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 12/07 at 4pm.  Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

 

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