The World of Ice Cream: A Cookbook Review

Introduction to The World of Ice Cream cookbook

For years, I had heard of Wanderlust Creamery’s inventive, unique, and popular flavors, like malted ube and Japanese Neapolitan. Jealous of the west coast and unable to sample their flavors, I’d been relegated to bookmarking their website and checking it every so often to drool over their new creations. A man can dream.

And sometimes, dreams come true. When I heard the owner of Wanderlust Creamery was writing a cookbook, I knew I had to get my hands on it. It is the first book in my life that I have ever preordered, and it is also the first cookbook I’ve reviewed.

I’m glad I did. The World of Ice Cream does not disappoint.

How Adrienne Borlongan’s Ice Cream Cookbook Excels

Adrienne Borlongan’s The World of Ice Cream takes the reader on a journey around the world from the comfort of their home kitchen. Her book doesn’t fall into any of the usual pitfalls that cookbooks tend to have, and her ice cream expertise and creative flavors help inspire further creativity from the reader.

In my personal experience, I only ever end up making one or maybe two recipes from a cookbook. In an average cookbook, I might not make a recipe for any number of reasons. Let’s face it—even if a recipe looks good, it often isn’t realistic to include in regular recipe rotation. A delicious-looking recipe usually doesn’t get made in my kitchen if it requires me to go on a wild goose chase for an ingredient, it requires too much effort or time, or it makes too much. Nobody wants their ingredients to go to waste.

With each page I turned in The World of Ice Cream, I surprised myself thinking, “I would actually make that.” And I did.

Reviewing Recipes from the Wanderlust Creamery Cookbook

The first recipe I made is the passion fruit cacao vegan ice cream. It’s the recipe that made me want to buy this book in the first place. 

This passionfruit cacao was heavenly.

The recipe was easy to follow, and it turned out spectacular. It was super tart, just on the verge of being not sweet enough, and it didn’t taste much of coconut at all, which is rare for homemade vegan ice cream. It’s a damn good ice cream in general, but knowing that it’s vegan makes it all the more impressive. It’s big on flavor with a delightful tartness that wakes you up, making it perfect for hot summer days. Everyone I offered it to enjoyed it as well. 

I have also, so far, made dark chocolate namelaka cubes, passionfruit jellies, and one of her ice cream bases to mix them into. My favorite part of the book is the last section, the one with all of the mix-ins, because Borlongan offers adaptable recipes that strongly encourage the reader’s creativity. She has multiple recipes for cake pieces, soft jellies, and fudgy namelaka cubes that can each be made into hundreds of different flavors. Her crispy nut dacquoise cake mix-in can easily be made with hazelnuts, peanuts, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, or even sunflower seeds. As the book’s cloudy cover implies, the sky’s the limit when it comes to flavors.

Here's my own take on a passionfruit-chocolate pairing, with dark chocolate namelaka and passionfruit jelly.

The chocolate namelaka was almost to die for—creamy, rich, decadent, and not cloyingly sweet. It was like a well-balanced fudge, and that means a lot coming from someone who’s picky when it comes to chocolate. There was just one catch: The finished product had little grains of unmelted agar in it. I’m not sure how that happened; I followed the instructions to a T. Nevertheless, remelting it and straining it fixed the problem. The namelaka cubes were also a little difficult to cut evenly, but maybe that’s just a skill issue on my part. I personally don’t mind having different size fudge pieces, but a true perfectionist might feel differently. 

The passionfruit jellies, however, were on point, and they were a great textural contrast with the dark chocolate namelaka cubes. The jellies didn’t freeze hard like gummy bears do in ice cream, and it was the first time I’ve experienced something chewy in a frozen dessert.

I’m looking forward to trying new flavors of jellies in ice cream, including:

1.       Lime

2.       Coconut

3.       Guava

4.       Peach

5.       Raspberry

Borlongan has inspired me to come up with a sixth flavor, one of my own: Dragon fruit. I know what I’m making next.

Flavors in The World of Ice Cream Cookbook

The table of contents, living up to the book’s name, includes well-traveled ice cream flavors like Salted Kaya Toast, Labneh & Pomegranate Rose Jam, and Australian Pavlova. Just the table of contents alone had me eager to read the whole thing cover to cover. The names of the ice cream flavors were a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar. Pretzel, ube, I know these. Noyeaux? Not so much. 

Cultural and International Perspectives on Ice Cream Flavors

Although the cookbook features inventive flavors, many of the flavors aren’t actually new; they’re just new to me. Borlongan explains that Western flavors are deemed the “standards” in sweets, with everything else deemed “weird” or “odd,” and I wholeheartedly agree that international flavors don’t get the recognition they rightly deserve. There are popular dessert flavors all around the world that just don’t get the same appreciation due to a lack of access to certain ingredients, differing cultural tastes, xenophobia that extends to food, or all of the above. The book opens the reader up to new flavors to explore. 

Ingredients Used in The World of Ice Cream Recipes

The first recipes in the book are stabilizer blends and simple ice cream bases. They included obscure ingredients that admittedly threw me for a loop, but thankfully, the book provides accessible alternatives. Some of the ingredients may need to be ordered online if you don’t have an Asian supermarket in close proximity, but most of the recipes don’t require anything too difficult to find. Still, if you live in a rural area, you might struggle to find something like ripe jackfruit or agar agar.

Many of the recipes call for just a few tablespoons of sweetened condensed milk, which is annoying considering that sweetened condensed milk usually comes in a can with more than just a few tablespoons. Unless you make a lot of ice cream or have another purpose in mind for the rest of the can, it feels like an unnecessary step when milk and sugar are both already in the recipe as well. It gives me the same vibe as when people add half-and-half to an ice cream recipe that also already has both cream and milk listed in the ingredients. Just, why? Maybe I’m missing something here.

Seeing all of these odds and ends in a recipe was off-putting, but remembering the incredible flavors listed in the table of contents, and remembering that I specifically pre-ordered this book, I trudged on, and I’m so glad I did. 

Final Thoughts on The World of Ice Cream

My overall rating of this cookbook is 9.5/10. That half point is deducted for the mild annoyance of using only part of a can of sweetened condensed milk, plus the chocolate namelaka needing to be strained for a smooth texture, which was not mentioned in the directions. 

These are minor gripes. This review doesn’t even scratch the surface of the incredible, inventive flavors this cookbook offers. 

The World of Ice Cream will take you on a trip not just from your bedroom to your kitchen but also around the world. This book will help any ice cream lover broaden their horizons. 

If you’re interested in purchasing this cookbook, you can find more information about it on Wanderlust Creamery’s website here. If you’d like to read more reviews by me, including recipe recommendations, you can find them here.

This post was not sponsored.