Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

Lavina was hosting a dinner with some friends, and asked me to bring dessert. Naturally – it’s my favorite thing to make/eat/lick the bowl. I was thinking of making cupcakes…but cupcakes are so 2009.

I decided to make vanilla ice cream with bittersweet chocolate sauce. The recipe is from Recipe of the Week Ice Cream: 52 Easy Recipes for Year-Round Frozen Treats by Sally Sampson. Yes, I bought a cook book that has an ice cream recipe for every week of the year. Something wrong with that?

Ice Cream Recipe:

1 ½ cups whole milk

½ cup white sugar

One 4-inch vanilla bean, split and and scraped

1 ½ cups heavy cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

pinch kosher salt

Chocolate Sauce:

¼ unsweetened cocoa powder

1 cup heavy cream

1 to 2 tablespoons white sugar (I opted for 2 of course)

Tahitian Vanilla Bean. Once you go pure vanilla bean, you can't go back (to extract). While it smells delicious, it tastes weird by itself (yes, I tried it, are you really that surprised?)

The contestants:

Saucy....

Remember that Bryer's commercial with the 6 year olds reading the ingredients in the ice cream? This reminded me of that for some reason.

I could add more pictures of my red ice cream maker, but figure you can also refer to prior posts.

Despite the fact that no eggs were in the recipe, this ice cream turned out airy, fluffy and DELICIOUS. For some reason, the sauce was not as thick as I had expected, but it was still yummy. Well, what isn’t tasty when there is a cup of heavy cream in it?

Note: If you are going to lick your ice cream maker bowl clean, make sure it is not frozen, or else your tongue will get stuck to it.