More Cookies, Less Cream

Recently, I purchased the ice cream maker attachment for my kitchen aid mixer (side note, I think it needs a name since it's my partner crime). First, I tried the mix that came with and that was very tasty. Second, I made some lemon sorbet that was way too tart. I followed the recipe exactly but next time, I'm adding more syrup. Last night, I tried my hand at ice cream from scratch.

I attempted the basic vanilla (no egg yolk) recipe from the Joy of Cooking and even used real vanilla bean. After assembling the ingredients last night and letting them chill, I set up my mixer to churn the ice cream this morning before work. While it churned, I crunched up a handful of Newman-O cookies since I wanted to do more of a cookies and cream deal. Well, the ice cream maker started "clicking" less than halfway through the churn time and I realized that it was actually already done. But I still needed to add the cookies! Somehow, I managed to get the dasher to re-center, dumped the cookies and gave it a couple of spins. It still seemed very soft to me but I transferred it to a container and then to the freezer to set during the day.


It set beautifully and was easy to scoop this evening. I have two complaints - not enough cookies and using heavy cream made it have a strange mouth feel. I felt like I had some weird coating on the roof of my mouth after I finished. The taste was pretty good, maybe not vanilla-y enough but I've had worse!


And as a bonus, I was able to make vanilla sugar using the remainder of the vanilla bean husk. That will make for some seriously awesome sugar cookies!