It’s been ages since I’ve made ice cream, much to the disappointment of my fellow producers but Carl in particular who always looked forward to Ice Cream Fridays with a touching, almost childlike delight. On the last day of every week, I would bring in three, four, sometimes five different flavors – burnt sugar pie, butter pecan with butter pecan popcorn clusters, amaretto amaretti, clotted cream brandy with Zero Bar chunks, fig and honey, reverse smores, vanilla toffee doughnut, bananas foster, chestnut cream, caramel bread pudding, kahlua chocolate truffle peanut butter cupcake and Double Devon cream Grand Marnier to name just a few. And then quite suddenly, virtually overnight, I lost my ice cream mojo. Some will argue it was because I’d discovered a new love in chocolate. A few will say that, after a seemingly endless array of outlandish flavors, I was creatively spent. Still others will point to that dinner party at which I sampled all thirteen of the tasty creations I served and ended up physically ill. Well, whatever the reason, while I lost my taste for making ice cream, my taste for eating the stuff certainly hadn’t deserted me.
And so it was that, this past weekend, I was making my way through the ice cream section and had the Haagen-Dazs sticky toffee pudding catch my eye. I waved Fondy over. “Hey, check this out!”.
But she ignored my find in favor of rescuing her own delicious dairy discovery from the freezer section. “I had this at my brother’s place,”she informed me, holding up a tub of the Breyer’s Chocolatey Crackle (tellingly titled Choco Crac in French). “It’s amazing!”
So we returned home and sampled our purchases. The toffee pudding was a sweet and silky spectacular marrying a whirlwind of textures and flavors – the fullness of the cream, the richness of the toffee twirl, the pleasing denseness of the brown sugar cake. The Breyer’s, in comparison, tasted like whipped butterfat.
I was inspired.
Today, I woke up, worked out, showered up, then headed over to the supermarket where I picked up the ingredients for my first homemade ice creams in two years. On tap for this end of week Ice Cream Friday: Vanilla Butter Tart, and Milk Chocolate Macaroon. Thought I’d ease my way back in before attempting the more advanced creations.
Boy, won’t Carl be surprised!
Today’s pics: Hey, kids! Make your own ice cream!
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