The Perfect Scoop?

If I had an ice cream shop, I'd have to have a display like this one above! Only mine would read "ice cream" of course. Ice cream and fabric? Yes, please! A perfect scoop indeed. (It appears those are scarves to me, but I'd be happy just to ball up some fabric). And of course my ice cream dress would be the uniform. I wonder if I could have a few made in different colors? Because at the rate I'm churning it out, I'd need a number of different styles. And then we'd need ice cream cups... I think Lois would agree these would complement our cart.

Andrew bought me an ice cream maker for my birthday (thank you!) and we've been having fun making lots of flavors since. Some have been better than others, and I still haven't found the key to keeping certain flavors from having an icy texture, but the majority of what we've made has been pretty fantastic. I'm now dreaming of an ice cream cart for my bike or an ice cream truck, kind of like this one. (Scroll through their gallery to see it.) Super cute, huh?

Andrew made two flavors by himself, which were two of the best ones, mango and chai tea, both custard based and delicious, but I didn't start to document the ice cream making with lil' Sony until a bit later. Our kitchen has really good light, which I should take advantage of more often. I used to get frustrated about not having good light in the kitchens of the last few places we lived and got out of the habit of trying to take cooking-in-progress shots. But now we're in business with good light and a good compact camera. So anyway, hmm, lets see, some other flavors we've made are strawberry (twice, one custard based and one not), chocolate (twice, one custard based and one not), lemon (same version twice), pistachio, roasted banana, Vietnamese coffee, plum-basil sorbet, and vanilla frozen yogurt. I think that's everything so far. My first go was strawberry. Though the flavor was great, and it was a deep pink color, the texture was icy. The second time (the non-custard based one) was a little better, and I also strained the seeds on that one, which was nice.

After reading a few recipes online and reviews for ice cream recipe books, I bought The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz. I recommend getting it if you're in the market for some ice cream recipes. He has a lot of interesting flavors and a variety of styles (custard based, that is with eggs, and non-custard based). Most of the recipes I've used are from his book. The chocolate is da bomb! Both of them. I actually prefer the Philadelphia style one a bit more (the non-custard based). The custard chocolate was so creamy that it was almost too creamy, if that's possible. Lois did most of the work on that one. Good helper, she is (most of the time anyway).

The lemon ice cream recipe was also a winner. We made that one twice as well. 

I had high hopes for the roasted banana, which I made into a sort of gourmet Chunky Monkey (a Ben and Jerry's banana flavor with walnuts and chocolate chunks). But, alas, it was icy. It was actually the most icy one yet. But certainly not so much so that I threw it out. The flavor was great. I'll have to work on this one because I really want a good batch of roasted banana. Maybe I should have just eaten the bananas roasted in brown sugar?

The Vietnamese coffee ice cream was very good though quite sweet, as expected I guess, due to the high amount of sweetened condensed milk. Love that stuff! But I think next time I will try to reduce it and add cream in place of it. 

My favorite though was Pistachio using a recipe from a book called Ices, The Definitive Guide, which a friend let me borrow.

Now that is a perfect scoop!!