I don’t know why I made this ice cream the first time. Maybe I always wanted to learn how to make dulce de leche or maybe I was so mesmerized by this recipe that I didn’t care that it would be more work. I guess it really doesn’t matter because all I know now is that this ice cream is the best I’ve ever had. I love is so much that I’ve made it multiple times and would be more than happy to eat nothing, but this ice cream for the rest of my life. Brown sugar toffee ice cream by itself sounds really good, but having the gooey, delicious dulce de leche swirled throughout this ice cold custard from heaven makes it almost orgasmic.

If you’ve been dying to buy that fancy shmancy ice cream maker, then this should be your reason to go for it. Just the thought of living without this ice cream seems almost pointless. You must make it! Okay, that’s a bit overdramatic, but seriously, you get the idea. This ice cream is pretty damn good. Make it already!

Brown Sugar Toffee Ice Cream with Dulce de Leche Swirl

(Recipe from Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy)

• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 1 pinch sea salt
• 1 vanilla bean, split with the seeds scraped out
• 4 egg yolks
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• Toffee bits (as many as you want)
• 1 cup dulce de leche (recipe below)

1. Heat the milk, 1 cup heavy cream, salt, and both sugars in a saucepan. Add the vanilla bean seeds and pod to the mixture. Cover the saucepan and let steep for 30 minutes.
2. Pour the remaining heavy cream into a large bowl and set a mesh strainer on top. Set aside.
3. In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks, then slowly pour in the warm milk mixture, whisking constantly. Pour the contents back into the pan and cook over low heat, stirring constantly with a heat-resistant spatula until the custard thickens. Strain the custard into the heavy cream. Put the vanilla bean back into the custard and chill thoroughly.
4. When chilled, remove the vanilla bean and freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturers instructions.
5. During the last few minutes add the toffee bits to the ice cream so that they are evenly distributed.
6. Whisk the dulce de leche. When the ice cream is finished churning, pour it into a freezable container, alternating between scoops of ice cream and scoops of dulce de leche. Freeze to desire consistency.
   

I’m a total newbie when it comes to making dulce de leche. I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to make it, maybe even ones from scratch that taste better, but until I can find a store that sells it, then this one will work for me. It’s really simple and the only hard part is adding more water to the pot when it starts to get low. Also, there is a very helpful video here that you can watch.

Dulce de Leche

• 1 can sweetened condensed milk

1. Remove label from can. With a can opener or even a nail and hammer, poke a few holes into the top of the can so that it can’t explode.
2. Fill a saucepan with water and place can inside. You’ll want enough water so that 2/3 of the can is submerged. Adding too much will cause the water to splash onto the top of the can and go inside your holes.
3. Boil the water for 3-5 hours depending on the thickness desired. (I usually cook mine for 4 hours and it ends up pretty thick). Be sure to refill the water every now and then as well.
4. Once you think it’s ready, remove the can from the water and carefully open it up. Pour all of the contents into a bowl and whisk to get the clumps out. Enjoy!

Note: When you open up the can do not be alarmed if the top of it still looks really liquidy. The bottom cooks the most so although you may have really thick dulce de leche at the bottom, you may still have a light color liquid at the top. I panicked and thought mine wasn’t done, but it will be.

I am such a nerd it’s almost unbelievable. Despite being a really healthy eater I tend to crave ice cream on a regular basis. I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about the delicious freezing cold sugary custard like goodness that is ice cream. If it was realistic, I’d gladly live off ice cream for the rest of my life.

So anyway, I was back at home and discovered that we had no ice cream. Oh no! What was I going to do!? I didn’t even have ingredients to make my own! Of course, being a chemical engineering major, my first thought was to make ice cream in a bag. Duh! It’s like the one and only science experiment you should even know how to do! Who needs to know chromatography, crystallization, or any of that other silly chemistry stuff! It’s all useless if you can’t eat it! The best part about making ice cream in a bag is that it only requires everyday items like milk, sugar, and salt. The one downfall it does have is that it melts really fast, but who cares if you’re going to eat it right away.

Ice cream in a bag is great because it’s a fun blast from the past for adults, but also something neat for kids to do at home. Kids will love this so much that they won’t even realize they’re doing science and they get a delicious cold reward at the end! Waht’s even better is that you can make easy variations with such a simple recipe like this. For example, instead of milk I used eggnog because I wanted something other than boring old vanilla. You can also add chocolate syrup for chocolate ice cream or maybe even peppermint or strawberry extract for a more interesting flavor. But hey, if you like plain old vanilla, then definitely go for it!

What you will need:

• 1/2 cup milk (I used eggnog for this one)
• 2 tablespoon sugar
• 1 ziploc sandwich bag
• 1 gallon size freezer bag
• Lots and lots of ice
• 1/4 cup rock salt (I didn’t really measure this)

Place the first three ingredients in the ziploc sandwich bag and then make sure you seal it tight! You don’t want any spills! Put enough ice in the gallon size bag to fill it up about halfway, then add the salt.

Place the sandwich bag in the gallon size bag and make sure the gallon size bag is sealed tight. After that shake, shake, shake the bag like crazy until the mixture thickens (about 5 to 10 minutes). I found it helpful to wear oven mitts while doing this because the bag can get VERY cold.

Finally, remove the sandwich bag from the gallon size bag and wipe it off a bit (you don’t want to end up eating the salt)! Now you can either eat straight out of the bag or you could do what I did and cut off the tip and pipe the ice cream into a dish. After that you’re all done. Now eat it fast or it’ll melt!

Tiramisu has to be one of my all time favorite desserts, but I rarely ever get to have it. It’s usually one of the first things I think about making when I want to bake, but a lot of the ingredients aren’t exactly common items that you have lying around (e.g. lady fingers, mascarpone, and coffee liqueur). However, I finally managed to get my hands on Kahlua liqueur and Bailey’s Irish Cream (not being 21 makes that a hassle to get) and couldn’t wait to do something with it.

Now how sad is this? Most kids cannot wait to turn 21 in order to be able to legally purchase their own alcohol and go out drinking whenever they want, but I only want to turn 21 so I can actually go into a liquor store and buy ingredients. I wish they at least allowed you to go inside if you’re 18, but no. I’m not even allowed to see what my choices are. Luckily I have great parents that will go and buy it for me.

So now I had the liqueur just sitting in the pantry waiting to be used. What was I going to make? Considering I hadn’t originally planned on baking I didn’t prepare myself with the other ingredients required for tiramisu, but I did manage to find a tiramisu ice cream recipe that I had all the ingredients for. How perfect! So it’s not quite tiramisu, but it’s still something fun to make. I love ice cream and I love tiramisu so a combination of the two couldn’t be bad, right?

Tiramisu Ice Cream

(Adapted from Desert Candy and The Perfect Scoop)

• 2 cups mascarpone (or 8 oz cream cheese and 1 cup sour cream)
• 2/3 cup whole milk
• 2/3 cup cream
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup Kahlua liqueur
• 3 tablespoons brandy or rum (I actually used Marsala)
• Pinch of salt
• Espresso chocolate (see recipe below)

Note: you can substitute 1 1/3 cups half-and-half for the milk and cream.

Espresso Chocolate

• 6 oz chocolate, chopped (I used semi-sweet chips)
• 1/2 cup strongly brewed espresso

Note: You can substitute espresso for 1 tablespoon espresso powder or even ground coffee.

Melt chocolate in a double boiler, then mix in espresso until fully combined. Do not allow the mixture to harden before adding to the ice cream.

1. Place all ingredients (except chocolate) in a blender and blend until smooth.
2. Chill mixture in your refrigerator for at least 1 hour.
3. Churn the mixture in your ice cream maker according to it’s specific instructions.
4. A few minutes before the ice cream is expected to be finished, prepare your chocolate mixture. However, keep it in your double boiler so that the chocolate does not harden.
5. When the ice cream is nearly done, with the machine still running, slowly and carefully drizzle chocolate directly onto the ice cream as it continues to churn. Be careful not to add too much at once or else the chocolate will clump up rather than form flecks. I found that using a fork makes things a lot easier to thin it out.
6. Transfer ice cream to a freezer safe container and allow ice cream to freeze for about an hour or until firm before serving.

I later got the idea to add chocolate flecks when looking at recipes for stracciatella ice cream. Stracciatella is a popular flavor in Italy, consisting of vanilla ice cream and pieces of chocolate. A type of mozarella and even egg-drop soup are often referred to as stracciatella as well. In Italian it literally means “little rags”, which in this case refers to the flecks of chocolate throughout the ice cream.

I decided to incorporate David Lebovitz’s recipe for a mocha ripple in my ice cream by drizzling in espresso chocolate instead. I altered it a bit so mine would be more like chocolate chips and less like a ripple. The ripple sounded neat and all, but who doesn’t love pieces of chocolate too? Considering I was also craving mint chocolate chip ice cream at the time I figured it’d be a good idea replace the ripple with espresso chocolate chips.

Even though it didn’t taste like I was eating tiramisu in the form of ice cream, in my opinion, it still came out great! It actually tasted more like cheesecake ice cream to me, but then again my sense of taste has been absolutely terrible lately so maybe it was just like that for me. In the future, I’ll probably make a form of this ice cream again, but do a few things a little differently (like making sure I actually have some rum to use).