Georgia Walnut

The past few weekly flavors have been inspired by delusions of beaches and warmer weather; happy thoughts to escape the harsh reality of our midwestern winter.  While my frozen counterpart enjoys a nice warm weather vacation this week, I remain in the Cities, proudly and hatefully enduring sub zero temperatures which will only harden me and make me enjoy 30 degrees for the remainder of the winter so much more (right?).

This flavor represents the true meaning of Nordic endurance: pure indulgence that only a deep winter freeze can truly incite – something to dull the pain of frostbite, lack of sun and society.  Specifically important keys to this equation: Chocolate and Booze.

Background: A few years ago my Pops clued me in to one of his favorite new dessert finds, the Georgia Walnut Pie at the Harbor View Cafe in Pepin, Wisconsin.  Being the fiend for pecan pie that I am, a new nutty pie treat piqued my interest.  The Georgia Walnut pie is an incredibly rich concoction of chocolate, walnuts, cinnamon and butter – a chorus of flavors that will melt the elastic in your socks and cause momentary amnesia.  As soon as I had it, I knew it was an ice cream flavor.  Add in a last minute improv of bourbon and you’ve suddenly created the perfect company for your January misery.  Typically we tell people that our ice cream isn’t meant for large quantities because we don’t cut corners when it comes to sugar and fat.  For this week, all bets are off.

To bring this flavor full circle I chose to create a Bourbon Walnut jam of sorts, by slowly reducing crushed walnuts with brown sugar and water until the flavor of the walnuts is infused into a thick – jam like reduction.  It looks like a caramel because of the color from the brown sugar, but the sugar is never cooked to a point where it technically caramelizes.  What you end up with is Jam.

Walnut Bourbon Jam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bourbon finishes it off to give it a well rounded kick.  Or maybe a roundhouse kick.  You decide.

Walnut Bourbon Jam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ice cream base is essentially our 3x Chocolate spiced with Cassia Cinnaomon.

85% Cocoa, Fair trade chocolate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ice cream is churned and the Bourbon Walnut Jam is layered and rippled throughout the pint.

Georgia Walnut

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 1/25 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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Coconut & Mangosteen Caramel

We’re entering the middle of January when the true doldrums of a Midwestern winter take hold, and you can’t help but dream of a warm paradise somewhere closer to the equator. With no sunny beach in my future for this winter, I get my kicks by enjoying the fruits (no pun intended) of such places to remind me of what I could have. Maybe its a bit sadistic, but I enjoy it.  As an aside, in the 90 odd flavors we’ve put up on this blog so far, we have yet to do one friendly to the dairy free and vegan audiences.  This marks our first flavor in both of those categories.

I first was introduced to the strange fruit through a short story in one of my college lit classes (the title of which I’ve forgotten) and have always been curious about it. Native to Indonesia and South America, for a long time they were illegal in the U.S. due to fears of harboring Asian fruit fly.  You can find them fresh now, but you’ll still have to do some hunting.  Since we weren’t able to get our hands on any fresh, we went the canned route (we’re making a caramel with them anyway) and picked them up with our coconut milk at our often lauded haunt – United Noodles.

Mangosteenmangosteen

 

 

Again with the little brains.  What does this mean?

 

 

For this flavor we chose to do a Mangosteen caramel that would be layered into the base and provide a truly tropical version of a coconut caramel.

ginger

 

 

 

Hinted with a bit of fresh ginger

 

 

 

The mangosteen was pureed and strained to remove the seeds and fibers, and then combined with the fresh ginger, sugar and boiled down into a nice flowable caramel.

Mangosteen Caramel CookingMangosteen Caramel

 

 

 

 

 

Next,  the coconut ice cream. Coconut milk works wondefully for a dairy free/vegan option because it has a high enough fat content to freeze without being icy.  With organic cane sugar and some organic vanilla, you’d never know the difference. (As long as you don’t loathe coconut).

Coconut Milk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally after churning the coconut base, the Mangosteen caramel was layered in as the pints were packed.

Coconut Mangosteen Caramel

 

 

What we end up with is a deliciously creamy coconut ice cream with a bright, lightly fruity, mangosteen caramel.

 

 

 

 

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 1/11 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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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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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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Roasted Chestnut Brown Butter

To continue the holiday theme – how about a flavor inspired by a song?  “The Christmas Song”, more commonly known as “Chestunuts Roasting on an Open Fire” is a Christmas classic that was originally written in 1944 by Mel Torme; its most famous rendition is probably its first – performed by Nat King Cole.  I’ve probably heard the song 500 times over the course of my life, and it was only a few years ago that I started to wonder what roast chestnuts would actually be like.  In addition, I also wondered, who actually does this as a family tradition?  Well, why not try them for the first time and make ice cream out of them too?

Chestnuts aren’t exactly easy to find, but pop up around Thanksgiving because of their use in stuffing.  I noticed them in the produce section a few weeks back and figured to give it a shot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before being fired, the chestnuts need have a slit put in each nut, to keep them from popping as steam builds up inside while they are roasting.  Then they get simmered in some salted water for a bit to add a bit of extra steam to the process and give them a nice salty coating.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, the chestnuts go onto a hot fire for about 15 minutes or so, being tossed often to keep them from burning on any sides.  While they roasted we mixed up a batch of our brown butter base for these chestnuts to take a bath in.

 

 

 

It’s times like these that I kick myself for not taking enough pictures.  Like one of the nutmeat before being ground.

 

 

 

That’s right, the nutmeat.  Once these weird little nuts are peeled, they look like little beige brains.  So we took them and ground them up to steep in the cream base while hot.

After steeping, we strained out the chestnut leftovers and gave it a spin in the maker.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The end result is a smooth, clean ice cream with hints of brown butter and a subtle but addictive sweet roast chestnut flavor.

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 11/30 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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