Spicy Cinnamon Chocolate Caramel Pecan

Love is in the air, and with Valentines Day just a few days away, we wanted to hit y’all with something decadent, and spice it up a little too, for your hot lovin. This one should be pretty easy to wrap your heads around. It has all those things that make you see hearts and stars when you eat it. Let’s get started with this week’s flavor – Spicy Cinnamon Chocolate Caramel Pecan.

 

 

Cocoa Powder, Cinnamon, Cayenne PepperChocolate, Cinnamon, Cayenne ice cream base

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the ice cream base, we’re using three components: Valrhona cocoa powder, Penzy’s cinnamon(China), and Penzy’s cayenne pepper. Like your love, flavor intensity is high here. The three components are whisked into our sweet cream base made with organic cane sugar. The base is pasteurized, cooled, and is ready for the churn.

 

 

Sugar caramelizingCaramel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, the caramel. Salty caramel. For your loving taste buds. First, sugar is brought to a boil until it’s caramelized and becomes a beautiful amber color, at which point we add our cream. The caramel is then finished with sea salt. It’s simple, and friggin’ delicious. The caramel gets layered into the ice cream before packaging.

 

 

Organic PecansPecans, toasted, salted

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We finish off this lovers’ delight with some toasted salty pecans. Seriously though, simplicity can sometimes be bliss. The pecans take a little ride into the oven, toast at a low temperature, and are finished with salt when they come out. They get tossed into the ice cream whole at the end of the churn.

 

 

Spicy Cinnamon Chocolate Caramel Pecan

 

 

Lovers unite! Decadent spicy chocolate cinnamon ice cream layered with salted caramel and pecans. Happy Valentines Day!

 

 

 

 

Spicy Cinnamon Chocolate Caramel Pecan:

Ingredients:

Ice Cream:
2 Cups of Heavy Cream
1 Cup of Milk (choose your percentage based on how fatty/creamy you’d like your ice cream to be – the higher percentage the creamier the ice cream)
2 large eggs
3/4 Cup sugar
1/3 cup Cocoa Powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Caramel:
1 Cup sugar
1 Tablespoon water
1 Cup heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Pecans:
3/4 Cup Pecans, halved
1 teaspoon Butter, melted
1/4 teaspoon sea salt

 

Instructions:

1. Prepare the base: Crack eggs into a mixing bowl and whisk fully.  Add sugar and whisk more until cream, sugar and eggs are combined.  Add cream, milk, cocoa powder, cinnamon, cayenne and salt, and whisk again until all are fully incorporated. The cocoa powder may not fully incorporate until the base is cooked.

2. Place ice cream base in a pot and heat over medium heat, whisking or stirring continuously. Heat until temperature reaches 165 degrees. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature (an ice bath will do this in about 15-20 minutes) and then place in a container, cover and chill in refrigerator overnight.

3. Prepare the caramel: In a heavy bottomed pan, with sides at least 4 inches high, add sugar and water and bring to boil. Do NOT STIR at this point or the caramel will become grainy.  As soon as the sugar starts to turn an amber color, remove from heat immediately. Add heavy cream and whisk vigorously until incorporated. Stir in sea salt and cool.

4. Prepare the pecans: Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Place pecans on a sheet pan and bake for 5 minutes. Toss with melted butter and salt. Bake for another 10 minutes. Cool pecans.

5. Churn ice cream base in ice cream machine according to manufacturer’s instructions. Add pecans in last 5 muntes of the churn. Empty ice cream into an air tight container and pour some of the caramel over the top. Lightly stir the caramel into the ice cream. You can eat immediately as soft serve, but we would recommend freezing in a tightly covered container for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight if you can wait.  The flavors will continue to develop and change over the next few days.  Enjoy!

*Yields approximately 2.5 pints

 

If you’d rather not make it, you can be one of two lucky winners of 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. Two winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 2/13/15 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally in Minneapolis. Prizes must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

 

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Donut with Maple Caramel

We’re no strangers to donuts in our ice cream, which has us always looking for better varieties and shops around town. This week, thanks to our friend Heidi, we found a new shop. Well, new to us at least, although it’s been around since 2008 – SugaRushKeoni Nguyen, owner of SugaRush, along with his son, are making some of the best classic donuts around, such as the bear claw, long johns, and bismarcks. His dough is nothing but perfection, being sweet, tender and yeasty, while maintaining a light airiness about it. These donuts are destined for our ice cream. And so the pursuit began to deconstruct one of my favorite classics: the maple long john. This week we’re calling it our Donut with Maple Caramel. Shall we?

 

 

Glazed Donut - Sugar Rush, St Paul

Donut Croutons - Prebake Donut Croutons - Postbake

 

 

 

 

 

This is one of SugaRush’s glazed raised donuts. Dear lord these are amazing. They aren’t reinventing the wheel here, but they are making an exceptional dough, which leads to an exceptional donut. You must go try one for yourself. The raised donut is the building block for the maple long john, so for the ice cream, this is our starting point. In order for the donuts to hold up in the ice cream, I decided to make croutons out of these glazers. They’re diced and then baked in the oven until crunchy. The croutons go into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

 

 

Caramel Maple Syrup

 

 

 

 

 

Next, the “maple glaze”. I made the decision to go with a maple caramel for the glaze portion, because I thought a traditional glaze would disappear in the ice cream. First, our sugar is caramelized, at which time cream is added followed by our maple syrup. The maple syrup thins out the caramel nicely while adding natualy maple flavor to the caramel. The caramel gets layered into the pints during packaging.

 

 

Donut with Maple Caramel

 

 

 

Donut with Maple Caramel. Consider this a better variety – a play on the classic maple long john.

 

Want to try it? 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 11/8/13 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!

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Charred Cauliflower

This week we set out on a flavor quest that needed to become a reality. We’ve said it before, but it’s hard to find an ingredient that doesn’t marry well in ice cream, and we can safely say that has been the case with all of our vegetable experimentations. Cauliflower is one that we haven’t played around with too much, and I just couldn’t get this idea out of my head to char cauliflower over a wood fire. I mean, just to eat that sounded good to me, but putting it in ice cream? Yeah, that had to work. Let’s find out…

 

 

Cauliflower

Oak Charcoal

Charred Cauliflower

 

 

 

 

 

It always starts with having wonderful ingredients and this head of cauliflower from Gardens of Eagan couldn’t be any more wonderful. It’s still warm from being on the truck coming from the farm. Look at it! It’s perfect! To get the process started, I lit up a batch of oak charcol in a silo type charcoal started. After preparing the coals, I threw a grill grate right over the top of the silo and began charring the cauliflower on all sides. By charring, my hope was to bring out some natural sweetness and nutiness from the caramelization. It worked!

 

 

Charred cauliflower about to get puréed with creamCharred cauliflower getting strained out after cooking with ice cream base

 

After the charring, the cauliflower gets pureed with cream and then cooked in our organic sugar cane ice cream base. After cooking and steeping, the cauliflower gets strained through a fine mesh sieve. The ice cream base is salted and cooled before it’s ready for the churn.

 

 

Charred Cauliflower

 

 

 

It’s ready and it’s a reality! This weeks flavor: Charred Cauliflower – ice cream infused with wood fired cauliflower. It’s creamy, nutty, and earthy, and it’s ready for your mouth.

 

Want to try it? 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 10/25/13 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!

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Buttermilk Biscuit with Ground Cherry Jam

For those of you who actually read our flavor explorations and how we go about our processes, you likely know that we coin a good ol’ frozbroz flavor brainstorming session as a  “flavor storm”. During one of these recent flavor storming sessions, the topic of buttermilk buscuits came up. It came naturally, as we love playing around with breads, doughs, and of course, extra dairy in our ice cream. So with buttermilk buscuits on the brain, the beginning of a flavor was born. To top it off, we just recenetly broke down a batch of ground cherry jam with fresh ground cherries from the magnificant Bossy Acers. First of all, who doesn’t like buscuits and jam? It turned into a no brainer. I mean, ground cherry jam in ice cream pretty much makes for an automatic 5 stars, but add in the buttermilk buscuits – now we’re elevating this concept to an off the charts scenrio. Let’s get it started with this week’s flavor: Buttermilk Buscuit with Ground Cherry Jam.

 

 

Buttermilk Buscuit DoughButtermilkButtermilk Buscuit Dough

 

 

 

 

 

Buttermilk Buscuit DoughButtermilk BuscuitsButtermilk Buscuits

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve never actually made buttermilk buscuits before, and I am sure that we have a lot to learn, but for first-timers, these buscuits couldn’t have turned out any better for our purposes. After doing a little recipe research, it seemed the proven method was to use a food processor for the job. We found out that the key to great buttermilk buscuits is agitating the dough as little as possible, and the processor allows for that by doing the mixing with just a few pulses. And that’s just what we did…first, pulsing the butter, flour, leveners, and salt. Next, pulsing in our organic buttermilk from Kalona, IA. Then, it’s a gentle pat down of the dough before cutting and baking off in the oven on a sheet pan. That’s it! Buttermilk buscuits! But actually, that’s not it. We’re not done with them yet.

 

 

 

Buttermilk Buscuit Croutons Before BakingButtermilk Buscuit Croutons

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We can’t just throw buscuits into our ice cream. We could, but that’s just not our style. We talk a lot about textures in our ice cream, and although the concept of soft buscuits has potential to be texturally pleasing, we made the decision to make the buscuits crunchy to add contrast. To do this, we cut our buscuits into croutons, toss with a little butter, and into the oven to become condensed, salty, buttermilk buscuit crunchers. Trust us, it was worth the extra effort. These crunchers are tossed in to our organic cane sugar base at the end of the churn.

 

 

 

Ground Cherries from @BossyAcresGround Cherries - PeeledGround Cherry Jam

 

 

 

 

 

And then…these!  Beautiful fresh ground cherries from our local farmers, Bossy Acres. We’ve said it before, and we will most certainly say it again – it is of uttmost impotantance for all of us to support our local farmers. I’m not sure I could explain it any better than the ladies at Bossy Acres, so click HERE for a great explanation of what supporting local means for all of us – our community. Back to the ice cream…Ground Cherries! After the very laborious task of peeling off the outer wrapper of the ground cherries, we mash them, and cook them down with a bit of sugar until we have our jam – liquid gold. The ground cherry jam is layered into the pints during packagaing.

 

 

Buttermilk Biscuit with Ground Cherry Jam

 

 

The result is our rich creamy ice cream packed with crunchy salted buttermilk buscuit croutons all layered with Minnesota-grown ground cherry jam. It’s just another flavor storm concept that’s been elevated to an off the charts scenerio.

 

Want to try it? 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 10/11/13 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!

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Red Hot Candied Apple

Its apple season, and as we rifle through our apple recipe list it becomes a bigger challenge every year to create new apple flavors.  Especially considering we love love love some of our old ones.   This year it was time to tackle the candied apple.

The classic cinnamon candy flavor on a candied apple – one you might also know from red hots candy or sticks of gum is Ceylon cinnamon, which is not the cinnamon most of us are used to eating in baked goods and desserts.  That would be Cassia.  Some call Ceylon “true cinnamon” even though its probably usurped by Cassia in usage.  It’s easy to confuse the two, but their flavors could not be more different.  In order to make sure this flavor accurately and truly represents that cinnamon candy flavor, we utilized Ceylon in several forms.  You cannot discern the two by looking at them, but I’m going to include a picture of Ceylon cinnamon anyway. 🙂

Ceylon Cinnamon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, the apples.  We chose these beauties from Hoch orchard, diced them up, tossed them with brown sugar, butter and powdered Ceylon, and roasted them in the oven to concentrate their flavor and squeeze out the water (as we do).  Then they were tossed with a little cane sugar at the end to provide a slight crunch.  Parents, if you are looking for a healthy, and easy snack/almost candy/dessert for your kids (or yourself) – just these roasted apples will do the trick.  But I digress, back to making ice cream.

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Roasted Apples

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, the syrup.  We made our basic cinnamon syrup, but using Ceylon cinnamon instead of Cassia.  For fun and for some color, I dissolved some red hots into the mix.  You know, to make it legit. 

Red hots Red hot cinnamon syrup Red Hot Cinnamon Syrup

 

 

 

 

 

 

The cream is made with our regular cane sugar base and infused with more ceylon cinnamon powder.  The roasted apples are tossed in at the end of the churn, and the syrup is layered in as the ice cream is packed into the pint.  The result is an ice cream laced with levels of ceylon cinnamon invoking that “red hot” flavor, and tart roasty chunks of apple speckled throughout each bite.

Red Hot Candied Apple

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There you have it – Red Hot Candied Apple alongside our red hot new labels!

Red Hot Candied Apple

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Want to try it? 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 10/4/13 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!

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