taste of fall

sweet potato ice cream with toasted marshmallows
The heat wave this week had me planning to make several quarts of ice cream this weekend. I went with another recipe from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home. It's a fall recipe, but I had a rather large, leftover sweet potato in my fridge and an unexplained hankering for marshmallows, so I went with it.

I started by boiling cubed sweet potatoes in milk, then pureeing the mixture with my handy-dandy immersion blender. LOVE that thing. I then added the heavy cream, granulated sugar, dark brown sugar and molasses and brought everything to a boil. Next I whisked in the tiny bit of cream cheese that Jeni calls for in all her recipes, along with some cinnamon and sea salt. I then placed my base in an ice bath to cool and moved on to making marshamallows.

I used Alton Brown's marshmallow recipe, which my partner Anthony swears by. I bloomed the gelatin in my mixing bowl with some of the water. I then combined the rest of the water, the corn syrup, granulated sugar, vanilla bean and salt, and boiled the mixture in a pot until it reached 240 degrees. Once it reached the proper temperature, I turned on my mixer (fitted with a whisk attachment) and poured the hot sugar slowly down the side of the bowl. I let the mixer go until my marshmallow mix was lukewarm, then poured it into a well-greased half sheet pan.

Once the marshmallows set, I cubed them and indulged my inner pyromaniac by torching them until golden brown. It was hard to wait for them to cool before folding them into the ice cream. They tasted so good---crispy on the outside and meltingly gooey on the inside. I had to leave the kitchen because I kept snacking on them.

This recipe was a lot of work, but well worth it. I thought this ice cream tasted like the best pumpkin pie I've ever had. Chris even liked it, though marshmallows are probably number one on his most hated foods list (ricotta is a very close second). The best part is that I have a ton of marshmallows left over. I'm going to dig up some chocolate and graham crackers and have a s'mores party!