Fresh from the Freezer

It's just how it comes out of the machine. Get your mind out of the gutter...  I like to share the food I make with others in my household under one condition—I always get to have the last piece. This holds true for when I make ice cream as well. I always have to have the last scoop. This rule also holds true when it’s my birthday and I get a birthday cake. I will share with everyone as long as I get to have the last piece. So tell me why, this year, the “last slice” was a skinny, pathetic little sliver. This is the thanks I get for being generous! Next time, I am NOT sharing!!! It’s even worse this year because I actually had another reason why I wanted to save my birthday cake—I wanted to use it to make ice cream. Birthday cake ice cream was my favorite flavor as a kid, and I wanted to recreate it by blending equal parts in weight of cake and milk. I was left with less cake than I originally intended, but it actually ended up being the perfect amount. More cake would have...

  It’s mamey season. For the uninitiated, mamey sapote is a delicious fruit that hails from tropical regions like the Caribbean. It’s easier to compare the flavor of mamey to a root vegetable than it is to compare it to another fruit. It has the texture of a creamy fruit but, according to the internet, the taste of sweet potato. It looks a lot like one, too. When I tried it, I actually thought it tasted like a deep, almost bitter caramel. My family thought it tasted like banana when it was in ice cream form, and I could sort of see where they were coming from.   However you describe the flavor of mamey sapote, it’s quite sweet when ripe. It only needs a touch of sugar to maintain the sweetness typical of ice cream. I chose to use white sugar so as not to detract from its delicate flavor, but I think this fruit would also play well with brown sugar or maple syrup as a substitute. You might even be able to omit extra sugar altogether.   Anyways, if you’re lucky enough to ...

 Have you ever heard of lulo? Also called the naranjilla, lulo is a tropical fruit that has a very tart, citrusy taste with some deeper, more caramelly notes. That’s the best way I can think of to describe it. A big, frozen brick of lulo had been sitting in my freezer for who knows how long. I got it on a whim when I saw it at the supermarket. Hooray for trying random fruits! I made this recipe in the Ninja Creami, but if you’d like to make it in a standard ice cream machine, all you’d probably have to do is double the ingredients, strain it, and churn it. Sorbets aren’t as fussy as ice cream. In fact, some of the best sorbets are totally no-cook! Check out my dead-simple, super delicious strawberry lemonade sorbet . I hope you give this sorbet a try!   Lulo Sorbet Recipe Ingredients 397 g (14 oz) frozen lulo pulp, thawed 85 g ( ⅓ cup + 1 tablespoon) sugar ~ ⅛ th teaspoon guar gum 50 g (scant ¼ cup) water Directions For Ninja Creami: Blend together all ingred...

This recipe is lower in sugar but still has great strawberry flavor. I really enjoy making frozen sweets with whatever ingredients I have on hand. I had (and still have) a lot of frozen strawberries to use up, and I liked the idea of combining strawberries with orange in the form of Triple Sec. Next time, I would at least double the amount of Triple Sec, because I couldn’t really taste it. I’m providing the recipe as I made it myself—just know that I highly recommend doubling it! Even though I felt like I couldn’t taste it, I do think it helped brighten up the strawberry flavor. Convenient not to have to juice a lemon to get that effect. You can also add extra orange flavor and fun textural contrast by mixing in candied orange peels . This recipe is lower in sugar but still has great strawberry flavor. I highly recommend this strawberry sherbet for spring and summer! It would also be great in a float with lemon-lime soda. This time, I paired it with a very slightly modified form of Dav...

  As a kid, did you ever get gummy bears on top of your ice cream from an ice cream parlor, and the gummy bears froze into tooth-breakingly hard rocks? That doesn’t happen with candied citrus peel. When I eat citrus fruit, whether it’s an orange, tangerine, mandarin, lemon, lime, pomelo, or grapefruit, I always try to save the peel. I wash it, pile it all up in a big Ziploc bag, and store it in the freezer until I’m ready to make a big batch of candied citrus peel. I love making this recipe by Ask the Food Geek . I like to make a big batch of all the citrus peels I have, but you can separate them by flavor if you prefer. For the uninitiated, candied citrus peel is exactly what it sounds like: the peel of a citrus fruit that has had the bitterness boiled out of it, been cooked down in sugar syrup until it’s super sticky, then gotten rolled in sugar (and sometimes dipped in chocolate). They are divine all on their own, but they also make an excellent addition to ice cream. Candie...

  For how dead simple it is to make, it’s well worth it. How am I supposed to know when it’s the right time to throw away holiday leftovers? Right now, it’s the end of January, and as of about a week ago, I still had opened, storebought eggnog in the fridge from December. Is that fine, or… am I… gross? My political view is that if it smells fine, looks fine, and tastes fine, then it’s fine. This is the capaign I’ll be running on. Please pledge your support for me in the next general election. Anyways, this is an extremely easy, one-ingredient recipe you can try if you, like me, have leftover eggnog you haven’t yet thrown out. Pour eggnog into a Ninja Creami pint up to the maximum fill line, stir in two tablespoons of dark rum (optional, but strongly recommended), and voila. Done. That’s all you need to make this. You can also add crunchy cookies as a mix-in if you’d like, but keep in mind that they won’t stay crunchy the longer they sit. I enjoyed adding speculoos cookies (B...

  I couldn’t find any other recipe for persimmon sherbet on the internet, so… voila! Sherbet is a bit more on the traditional side, isn’t it? Off the top of my head, I can only name a handful of flavors: orange, lime, raspberry, rainbow (which is usually a mix of the previous three), sometimes strawberry, and that just about covers it. It’s an old-fashioned treat that no one wants to disrespect by changing things up. But doesn’t sherbet deserve a little more recognition and diversity in flavors? It makes an excellent blank canvas for all fruits, with dairy rounding out the sharper edges of whatever fruit flavor it hosts. It’s also fun to invent new things, and I couldn’t find any other recipe for persimmon sherbet on the internet, so… voila!   I have heard that persimmons can be very sharp in taste when they aren’t ripened enough, but I thankfully have not experienced this yet. I got my hands on some Fuyu persimmons and waited to eat them until they were soft and ...