Donuts – FROZBROZ

This week is pretty simple…some days you just wake up and you have coffee and donuts on the brain. That’s what happened to us. So naturally we thought this would make a great ice cream flavor, and you know, we were right. Let’s get started with this week’s flavor – Coffee and Doughnuts.

For the ice cream, we decided to go with a coffee infused ice cream base. These are Guatemalan Dark beans from one of our great local roasters in Minneapolis, Peace Coffee. The beans get course ground and are added into the base before we heat pasteurize it. Once the ice cream base is brought up to temperature, the grounds are steeped for a few minutes, then strained out with a fine mesh strainer. The base is then cooled and is ready for the churn.

For the donuts, sometimes when you have them on the brain, you have to go with an old favorite. Cake doughnut from A Baker’s Wife in South Minneapolis. These! These are perfection! Crispy outside. Light and airy inside. Come on. To get the doughnuts into the ice cream, we’re making croutons. Diced, tossed with a little butter, and then into a low oven to toast lightly. The croutons are cooled and get tossed into the coffee ice cream prior to packaging.

Simple, but amazing! Peace Coffee infused ice cream with chunkers of locally made donuts from A Baker’s Wife. Let’s get this out of our brain and into our mouth.

Coffee and Doughnuts

Ingredients:

2 cake doughnuts
1 Tablespoon Butter, melted
2 Cups Heavy Cream
1 Cup Whole Milk
3/4 Cup Organic Cane Sugar
2 Eggs
1/4-1/2 Cup Coffee, course ground – depending on how strong you want
3/4 teaspoon salt

Instructions:

1. Prepare the doughnut croutons: Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Line a baking sheet with a silpat or parchment paper. Dice the donuts into 3/4 inch cubes and toss with melted butter. Spread doughnut cubes out evenly on lined sheet sheet so that none are touching each other. Bake for approx. 30 minutes. The cubes should be slightly golden brown. Remove from the oven, cool, place in air tight container, and freezer until ready to use.

2. Prepare the coffee ice cream: Crack eggs into a mixing bowl and whisk fully. Add sugar and whisk until sugar and eggs are combined. Add cream, milk, coffee and salt and whisk again until all are fully incorporated.

Place ice cream base in a pot over medium heat, stirring continuously. Continue to heat mixture until temperature reaches 165 degrees. Remove from heat and allow coffee to steep for about 5 minutes. Strain coffee grounds out with a fine mesh strainer. Cool the strained ice cream base to room temperature (an ice bath will do this in about 15-20 minutes) and then place in a container, cover, and chill in refrigerator overnight.

3. Churn ice cream base in ice cream machine according to manufacturer’s instructions. Place coffee ice cream into container and stir in 1 cup of doughnut croutons. Freeze in a tightly covered container for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight if you can wait. Then, enjoy!

*Yields approximately 2.5 pints

If you’d rather not make it, you can be one of two lucky winners of 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. Two winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 2/27/15 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally in Minneapolis. Prizes must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

We’re no strangers to donuts in our ice cream, which has us always looking for better varieties and shops around town. This week, thanks to our friend Heidi, we found a new shop. Well, new to us at least, although it’s been around since 2008 – SugaRush. Keoni Nguyen, owner of SugaRush, along with his son, are making some of the best classic donuts around, such as the bear claw, long johns, and bismarcks. His dough is nothing but perfection, being sweet, tender and yeasty, while maintaining a light airiness about it. These donuts are destined for our ice cream. And so the pursuit began to deconstruct one of my favorite classics: the maple long john. This week we’re calling it our Donut with Maple Caramel. Shall we?

This is one of SugaRush’s glazed raised donuts. Dear lord these are amazing. They aren’t reinventing the wheel here, but they are making an exceptional dough, which leads to an exceptional donut. You must go try one for yourself. The raised donut is the building block for the maple long john, so for the ice cream, this is our starting point. In order for the donuts to hold up in the ice cream, I decided to make croutons out of these glazers. They’re diced and then baked in the oven until crunchy. The croutons go into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

Next, the “maple glaze”. I made the decision to go with a maple caramel for the glaze portion, because I thought a traditional glaze would disappear in the ice cream. First, our sugar is caramelized, at which time cream is added followed by our maple syrup. The maple syrup thins out the caramel nicely while adding natualy maple flavor to the caramel. The caramel gets layered into the pints during packaging.

Donut with Maple Caramel. Consider this a better variety – a play on the classic maple long john.

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 11/8/13 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!