If you’ve been following us at all over the last couple of years you know we love our seasonal and holiday flaves. What better flavor to preface a New Years celebration than Champagne? We knew a Champagne flavor would require some sort of fizz or pop to be fully realized, and that poses a challenge with ice cream since fizzy drinks don’t translate well frozen for a multitude of reasons. We theorized Pop rocks would be a nice way to add the bubbly effect and we thought making our own would be the only right way to do it. We found out that the homemade version of pop rocks doesn’t quite provide the sizzle we were looking for, so we were forced to turn to store bought Pop Rocks. The end result was absolutely worth it.
Homemade pop rocks are made with baking soda and citric acid crystals in your candy to spur a chemical reaction which in turn creates a fizz.
We took a shot at making our own and were successful in practice, but the end result didn’t have the pop we wanted for the ice cream. Real pop rocks are created by injecting CO2 into the candy at a high pressure and provide a much more dramatic “pop” than the home made version. Since we don’t have the high pressure CO2, we hunted down the original.
Pop Rocks. It still took some finagling to get them to a point where they would survive the ice cream bath without reacting and exploding before the ice cream was finished. The answer was to coat them with chocolate to keep them from going off. To pair with Champagne, we felt white chocolate was the right choice.
We reduced some organic white chocolate bars into a sauce and letting it cool to the point where we could coat the pop rocks entirely, in effect creating a “bark” that looked exactly like the candy cane bark I was used to my mom making as part of the Christmas cookie windfall.
The bark was crushed into small chunks in preparation for being churned into the ice cream.
Next, the ice cream itself. We reduced champagne into a caramel – and used the caramel to sweeten and flavor the ice cream, as well as for a caramel swirl.
Where did we end up? A lightly champagne flavored ice cream rippled with a sweet champagne caramel and full of white chocolate coated pop rocks that sizzle and crack in your mouth.
You can win one of the only two pints in the world, filled with this fabulous, scratch made craft ice cream in our weekly pint giveaway. Enter your name in the comments section here, or on our facebook page under the posted contest. 2 lucky winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 12/19 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!
