Sweet Melissa Sundays: Brown Sugar Vanilla Ice Cream

Melissa’s recipe is even easier than your usual custard based ice cream because it calls for combining all of the ingredients in one bowl over a double boiler and heating to 180 F versus tempering the eggs by adding warmed cream/milk to the egg and sugar mixture. I was in a bit of a hurry, though, and figured tempering the eggs and making the custard that way would be faster than doing it over a double boiler. I whisked the egg yolks, brown sugar, salt and milk powder in one bowl, then heated the milk and cream combo before adding some of it slowly to the egg mixture to temper the eggs. I then heated the custard to about 175 F, strained it and finally added the vanilla extract (I was all out of vanilla beans so I just added a bit of extra extract).

I only made a half batch of the ice cream because I have so many other flavors I want to try and only have so much room in my freezer. Unfortunately, we’ve already eaten the entire half batch! It was absolutely delicious! I didn’t think the flavor was all that different from traditional vanilla ice cream – the brown sugar wasn’t very noticeable. The texture, though, that was a different story. This was an incredibly smooth and creamy ice cream – probably one of the best textures of any of the ice creams I’ve made to date. We enjoyed some sandwiched between some of the no bake cookies I made yesterday (I hope to post the recipe later tonight) and some plain with festive red and blue sugar sprinkled over the top.

Thanks to Karen for a wonderful pick this week! You can find the recipe over on her site and you can check out the SMS site to see how the other bakers fared with their ice cream.