I don’t own a bombe shell and have no interest in buying one, so that cut out pretty much all the rest of the types of frozen dessert options from this chapter. There are two mousse recipes, but I’ve made mousse before, it turned out great, and neither of these recipes looked worth doing. So instead we’re just doing more ice cream, and since the process is pretty much the same every time, I’m rolling these two into one entry.
With bunches of people coming over for pre-Dark Knight Rises Batman marathoning, I went ahead and made a full recipe of the Maple Pecan ice cream. This recipe was also custard style, involving eggs and the need to dodge food poisoning via cooking them. 
That’s a pot of warmed milk product. The recipe called for half and half. I don’t keep half and half in the house because 1) I believe in fat and 2) I despise coffee and don’t let that in the house, either. So I’ve been faking it by doing half 2% milk and half heavy cream. It works quite well.
This recipe called for ten egg yolks. That’s what they looked like when I decided they’d been whipped to “foamy” as described in the recipe. The recipe said 2 minutes, this was as foamy as they got after eight. That doesn’t look like what I’d expect, and I contemplated whipping them some more in hopes of getting something that would match the description. I’m glad I didn’t, because here’s what happened when I added the hot cream.
I’m not sure how well the pictures convey it, but it foamed in a major way. It foamed up so much that when I put it in the double-boiler to heat until it got to the thick-enough-to-cover-the-spoon stage, it was more or less already there.
Oh goody, I’ve ruined Batman ice cream. How does that even happen? I did what I always do when things seem to have gone horrifically wrong with recipes from this cookbook: I pretended everything was fine and carried on. Tossed in the last ingredients, poked at the distressingly foaming custard, then slapped it into the fridge to cool over night.
By the next day the foam had collapsed and it was back to liquid. It was also not thick enough to cover the spoon anymore. Tragedy? The recipe called for adding heavy cream after getting to the thick stage, which I’d done, so that could be why it’s thinner now. Or those egg yolks had some extra foam-oomph they were hiding from sight just for spite. Or maybe this was an omen for the mild disappointment I was in for at my midnight showing.
It turned out just fine. Nice flavor, good texture, and the pecans mixed in post-ice-cream-maker very easily. That’s a picture of the first half of it before I mixed in the pecans. The ice cream was a big hit, and almost all of it got consumed despite copious quantities of pizza consumed earlier in the evening. I’d make it again, but probably just a half recipe unless it was for another large event.
For the last recipe, I decided to mix things up and go Philadelphia style, which doesn’t use eggs. This was even easier than the other recipes. There are a whopping two recipes for Philadelphia style ice cream in this book: Chocolate and vanilla. I hoped for chocolate, because, why not? Then I committed a classic act of lazy, and didn’t bother to go to the grocery store when we were four ounces short of the sweetened dark chocolate called for in the recipe. Instead, I augmented with a dark chocolate with orange peel bar that’s been hanging around the kitchen hoping somebody would eat it. That’s a very foolish place for it to do that; chocolate gets eaten in the living room, or the den, or at my desk. Much better places for it to lurk.
Waiting for the chocolate to melt was the hardest part of this recipe. I peeled 20 hard boiled eggs in the time it took for the chocolate to melt. Oh agony. Oh struggle. Oh…yeah, a monkey can do this.
In case you ever need to know, this is what eight ounces of sugar looks like. Because I had time to measure it out ahead of time, while waiting for the chocolate to melt. And, you know, because if I didn’t take a picture of this, I wasn’t going to have many pictures for this recipe.
Once the chocolate is melted, you add the dairy (home-made half and half for me) and the sugar, stir and, er, that’s it. You’re ready for the ice cream maker.
This turned out quite nice, and I didn’t miss the eggs. Neither did any of the people at the potluck I took this to. Using the orage peel chocolate bar was inspired and made this much better than it would have been otherwise. If I go back to this, I’ll probably toss in the other chocolate bar that’s been lurking in the same corner which is chock full of crystallized ginger.
And this makes July the first month I’ve finished early. This probably means August is jinxed.
Anaea Lay 