ice cream break

white chocolate ice cream with salted macadamias
I've been working on so many cake related things recently that I decided I needed a brief hiatus. With summer around the corner, I decided to churn some ice cream this weekend.

At work we make a salted cashew ice cream that is one of my personal favorites. The ice cream base has cornstarch in it as the thickener (instead of egg yolks) in order to keep the pure white color of the milk. Once the base is churned in the ice cream machine, BUTTERED and SALTED cashews are stirred in. Butter and salt in ice cream? Oh yeah. So good. Of course I would want to try my own spin on the recipe at home.

White chocolate, as you know, is pure sugar, so adding a salted nut to it made perfect sense to me. I chopped the macadamia nuts then roasted them in the oven with butter and salt. Once the ice cream finished churning, the nuts, and all that melted butter and salt, were cool enough to fold in.

The white chocolate made the smoothest ice cream base I've tasted in a long time. And the salted macadamias were, to use the vernacular, REDONKULOUS.


mango sorbet
I used a recipe from the Ciao Bella Book of Gelato and Sorbetto. I recommend buying this book if you are interested in a foolproof way to make ice cream or sorbet at home. You learn two base recipes, plain and chocolate, that you can add different ingredients to in order to make different flavors. The sorbet recipes are just as simple. You make a single batch of simple syrup, then add different amounts of fruit puree to it.

The finished sorbet tasted just like biting into a fresh mango. I sandwiched a scoop in between two home made graham crackers, closed my eyes, and tried to remember what summer feels like.

Next weekend I'll be working on another cake with Anthony and hopefully in my spare time I'll be working on a killer coconut cake. Stay tuned my friends.