The holiday season is in full swing which means folks are busy baking up all their favorite cookies, cakes, pies and pastries to share with family and friends. And hey, we’re no different. So when my loving wife suggested that we make gingerbread cookies with our four-year-old son to swing into the holiday spirit, I concurred, and then immediately got caught up with the idea of gingerbread and ice cream. It’s not new concept to us. In fact, gingerbread was the second flavor we ever put out on this here blog. This time I wanted to add in the component of lemon, you know, the classic lemon icing that tops gingerbread cookies. So I toiled with the idea of making a gingerbread flavored ice cream and adding lemon bars, but in the end, I was a sucker for a lemon ice cream with gingerbread croutons. Honestly, I thought you all would be too. So let’s get started with this week’s holiday flavor: Gingerbread with Lemon Cream…
In case you were wondering why we’re not making gingerbread cookies…we are looking for something dense that will hold up in our ice cream. We adapted this recipe from Smitten Kitchen for our ice cream, but the original produces a fantastic dense sticky gingerbread that is fantastic on it’s own. We start with Cardamom, Cloves, Cinnamon, Ginger and Nutmeg to give this cake intensity. The batter is poured into a Bundt pan and after baking is knocked out to cool. For the ice cream, we cube the gingerbread and bake again to form a crunchy layer on the outside that will hold up to the ice cream. The croutons are tossed in at the end of the churn.
Next, we mix in a handfull of freshly grated lemon zest to our organic sugarcane base before cooking. The base is cooked, the zest is steeped, and then strained before cooling and into the ice cream maker.
Gingerbread with Lemon Cream! It’s craft ice cream for the holidays and we want to share it with you…
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 12/20/13 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!
