Cherry Torte

Birthdays often carry countless traditions. Over time, some of those traditions fade away, but for my father-in-law, there is one birthday tradtion that has stayed with him since his early childhood. After the first taste of his mother’s cherry torte, it was a request that never faded when his birthday came around. Now years later Charlotte, his mother, has passed away, but my mother-in-law graciously makes Charlotte’s cherry torte recipe, and my father-in-law reluctantly shares his birthday tradition with the rest of his family. So this week, one week after my father-in-law’s birthday, I set out to deconstuct and recreate Charlotte’s cherry torte in FrozBroz fashion; ice cream style! Let’s get started with this week’s flavor: Cherry Torte.

 

 

Short bread starterPecans added to shortbread doughPecan shortbread crust

 

 

 

 

 

Contrary to my wife’s family’s belief, I actually can reproduce Charlotte’s short bread crust with flawless results. This crust is a key component as it adds texture, nuttiness, and the integral buttery flavor of traditional shortbread. To achieve this, sugar, butter and flour are mixed together before adding crushed pecans, at which point the dough is pressed into a pan and baked. After cooling, the crust is broken up into chunks, and for the ice cream, we toss the chunkers in toward the end of the churn.

 

 

Cream Cheese

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cream Cheese! The second layer of the torte consists of cream cheese whipped with sugar, vanilla, and whipped cream. For the ice cream, we incorpoarte the cheese and vanilla into our pure cane sugar ice cream base during the cooking process. This sets the stage for an ultra rich cream cheese ice cream base.

 

 

Tart CherriesTart cherries ready for pureeReduced tart cherry puree

 

 

 

 

 

Next, the cherry topper! This is where I’m going to break tradtion a little. At this point, the torte could essentially be constructed with a can of sweet cheeries in heavy syrup; crust chunkers fill the bottom of a pan, the cream cheese/whipped cream is spread on, and the canned cherries in heavy syrup top it all off. I made the desision to go with tart cherries in water for the ice cream. I wanted the cherries to contrast the sweet ice cream by adding that tart twist. We puree the tart cherries and water, then simmer down with a bit of cane sugar on the stove top until the cherries reach proper viscosity. The cherry jam is still sweet, but brings that element of tartness. We layer it into the pints during packaging.

 

 

Cherry Torte

 

 

 

The result is a rich cream cheese ice cream studded with pecan shortbread chunkers and layered with a tart cherry syrup jam. This is a FrozBroz tradition that is destined to never fade. Happy Birthday Dan!

Want to try it? 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 5/24/13 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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Cream Cheese Zucchini Bread

Even though we have, for the most part, moved out of the harvest season, there are still flavors that we never had a chance to bring to life. This is due to the fact that when choosing from the enormous array of local fruits and vegetables, we want to showcase our top picks for the season. This week, we wanted to step back and remember one of the “passed by”; Zucchini! It’s one that we passed by in the prime of it’s season, but wasn’t forgotten. Heck, you might even be able to find a few late-harvested zucchini at one of this year’s last Farmers’ Markets this weekend. With that, let’s jam out this week’s flavor: Cream Cheese Zucchini Bread.

Zucchini bread is one of those things that was around a lot when I was a kid. You know how it is in the Midwest during the month of August? Everyone who has a garden is trying to download their monster zucchinis off on everyone else. My mom must have been a taker of many, because it  seemed like there was always another in queue.

It’s the Midwesterner’s coffee cake. So I thought, let’s put it in the ice cream.

Using my mom’s age old recipe we started with whole zucchinis and shredded them up. The other standards get added; eggs, sugar, flour, oil, cinnamon and into the oven.

 

 

 

 

And there you have it – classic zucchini bread! Slice it, butter it and  it’s chow time. Only thing, it would become a mushy mess if we added it to our ice cream at this point in the bread’s existence.

 

 

 

 

 

Instead, we cube the loafer and toss with melted butter and bake until they become beautiful crunchy morsels of zucchini bread goodness. Seriously folks, croutons? So good.

The crunchy crouton morsels get tossed into the ice cream at the end of the churn, but first we have to make our base mix.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It seemed only right to add cream cheese to our base emulating a cream cheese frosting. It wasn’t something that my family traditionally topped our zucchini bread with, but it seemed like the right decision for the ice cream. After all, us Broz are all about adding more dairy to our dairy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The final result is a rich velvety cream cheese ice cream with crunchy zucchini bread croutons.

 

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 10/26 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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Sweet and Sour Cream Cheese Wonton – Fan Flavor Contest No. 2

This brings to a close our second “Fan Flavor Contest”.  Again, the winner will be stylin in a spanky new FrozBroz T-shirt as well as eating a pint of their suggested flavor. We had a great response and everyone offered an impressive array of flavors, some intriguing and some kinda scary.  So thank you to everyone who participated, and congratulations to Adam Arling who was the winner of “Fan Flavor Contest” No. 2 with his flavor suggestion of Sweet and Sour Cream Cheese Wonton.

When we make a flavor, conceptually, there are a number of different routes to take it. For this one, we both immediately knew that making a sweet and sour syrup to layer into the pints was the route for us.

 

 

The sweet and sour syrup consists of a reduction of rice vinegar, tomato paste, sugar, pineapple chuckers, and last but not least…Sriracha Chili Sauce. We needed to reduce this mixture into a syrup instead of thickening with cornstarch, so we could evaporate as much of the water content as possible.

 

 

 

 

After the syrup has reduced and thickened, we strain out the pineapple and tomato solids and we’re left with a nice sweet and sour syrup that doesn’t get icy when frozen in the ice cream.

 

 

 

 

 

The wontons presented a challenge – so thin and fragile they’re likely to get soggy in the cream – so we took a double headed approach – some steeped in the cream to add the fried flavor, and others were rolled up before frying and dried in the oven after to get a maximum crunch.  Will they hold up in the ice cream? Time will tell, but the wonton flavor is undeniable.

 

 

 

 

 

Cream Cheese! We decided to mix this directly into our base  . It makes for an ultra rich cheese cakey ice cream, along with all of the starches from steeping the base with fried wontons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That wraps up or second “Fan Flavor Contest” with Adam’s suggestion of Sweet and Sour Cream Cheese Wonton FrozBroz style. Congrats Adam on the cray cray suggestion.!

 

 

UPDATE: 4/23/2012 Feedback from one of our winners…

Four of us tried the Wonton ice cream last night. Three of us enjoyed it; it was a bit too “saucy” for the fourth person’s tastes (she’s sensitive to vinegar flavors).

Here are our comments:
+ The ice cream base is really tasty and creamy. The cream cheese added smoothness to the base; we all felt that this base was exceptional in its texture. The flavor was mild, which was good so that it didn’t “fight” the sauce ribbons.
+ The sauce ribbons provided a good flavor contrast. It was a weird flavor for ice cream, but weird in a good way. We all enjoy funky desserts, so we really got into the fact that there was sweet n’ sour sauce in our ice cream!
+ The crunchy wonton bits added a nice texture contrast, and their flavor was appropriately wonton-y. Personally, these bits were my favorite aspect of the ice cream.
+ The other wonton bits were too mushy; they made it feel like the wonton bits were inconsistent.
+ The blending was inconsistent. Some bites were really strong with loads of sauce, while others were sauce-less. With much of the flavor coming from the sauce, we felt that the end product would be better if the ribbons were thinner and more evenly incorporated.
+ This same group of people tasted your Cardamom Basmati Pistachio ice cream, and we all agreed that we LOVED that one and LIKED this one.

 

 

Please don’t forget about our Indiegogo fundraising – we have just under 26 days to go and need all the help we can get! Help us meet our goal so we can start making our ice cream and getting it to all that want it.

http://www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz?a=446076 

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