gourmet ice cream

December 13, 2012

Cardamom Fruitcake

Fruit Cake is constantly the butt of holiday gift giving jokes. For years I heard about how supposedly terrible they were and had imagined this loaf to be some concoction of olives, yeast, nuts, dirt, grapes and cement. The truth is a well made fruit cake is pretty darn good and we thought it would be more than appropriate for a holiday flavor. Fortunately for us, we found out about these amazing “Not Your Average” fruitcakes from Sun Street Breads and jumped at the chance to use them in a flavor.

These babies are chock full of almonds, figs, crystallized ginger, candied orange peel, bittersweet chocolate and are soaked in rum and aged for at least a month.

Seriously, are you on board yet? They are dense, rich and absolutely wonderful in every sense of the word. I for one, would be thrilled if one of these showed up in a package for me.

For the ice cream we chose to use the fruit cake as-is – chopped up into smaller chunks. It is so rich and dense with rum and sugar that we felt it would hold up in the ice cream perfectly without any extra help, and it did that to say the least.

We chose to pair it with a cardamom ice cream – one of our favorite spices that makes its presence most known around the holidays, especially in the desserts and cookies from our Norwegian heritage. The cream is steeped with fresh ground cardamom while the mix is hot to infuse the cream with the bright, fruity flavor cardamom is known for.

To finish the fruitcake pieces are tossed into the cream mix while spinning in the maker.

The result is a bright, cardamom spiced ice cream decorated with dense chunks of fruit cake that give you a variety of nutty, fruity and chocolate-y bites, with the rum of the cake humming softly in the background all the while .

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 12/14 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!

July 12, 2012

Deconstructed Blueberry Pie w/Charred Vanilla Bean

As a kid, my family would often spend a day of our summer vacation picking wild blueberries along a railroad track in northern Wisconsin, south of Hayward. We’d endure loads of mosquito bites and hoards of woodticks to earn a few gallon pails full of them, that would usually net a pie or two after we finished snacking. It was always one of my favorite pies, partially due to its rarity, but mostly because of the incredible sweetness and flavor combined with the dark blue hue of the macerated berries. I’ve mentioned these pie memories before – they are landmarks on my brain.

I hoped to get my hands on some of those very wild blueberries for this flavor, but I got the next best thing, which was these beauties from our recent fave Svihel farms from Foley, MN.

You might remember a few weeks ago when we released the Smoked Bourbon Vanilla Bean ice cream that we mentioned some discoveries while experimenting with vanilla beans on the grill. One of those discoveries was a charred version which we knew would give us a nice option so we preserved it for future use.

It paired wonderfully with the pie concept and made a nice dark fleck in the ice cream.

The blueberries were reduced with sugar, lemon, cinnamon and cardamom to create the “pie filling”.

Then there was the pie crust. Similar to the deconstructed pecan pie flavor we made last fall, the pie crust was baked off and broken up to go into the charred vanilla ice cream as an add in – floating throughout the pint.

The blueberry filling was layered into the pint to leave thick, ribbons of sticky blueberry jam.

It can be yours.. As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (7/13/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and agree to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

May 3, 2012

Fennel Pollen

Sometimes simple is best. Over the course of the last year we’ve explored ice creams that sometimes include up to 5 main flavors. Big flavors like these greatly open up the variety and combinations we can make, but can also overshadow the greatness of one of those ingredients on their own.

In this instance, it was extremely tempting to pair the Fennel pollen with almonds, or honey or pistachios, etc. But in the end, the flavor of this particular spice turned out to be so complex and so incredible in ice cream that it demanded the stage to itself, at least for its first foray into our flavor cache.

Fennel pollen is an expensive spice, not so much because of being hard to find, but because of how difficult it is to harvest. It’s gathered by shaking it off the buds of fennel flowers and can take quite a bit of time to collect just an ounce. It has a golden appearance, and kind of tastes like it.

We steeped the fennel pollen in the cream to fully extract as much flavor as possible. The batter was then churned immediately. It seemed almost too easy.

We expected a unique flavor, but nothing like this. Once paired with the cream and sugar base, the obvious flavors such as anise blossomed, but so did caramel and curry notes. It could pair extremely well with a lot of different desserts or dishes, but to appreciate the depth of the flavor it really needs to be eaten all by itself.

Gold.

If we ever imagined an ice cream flavor for royalty, this would be it. We’re very excited about the how it turned out, and have a feeling this will be a Froz flavor for a long time to come.

As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page or in the comments here to be entered into the drawing. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (5/4/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else.

Good luck!

Would you like to see more of this kind of ice cream or be able to buy it online? Then please, help us with our fundraiser on indiegogo, we only have 8 days left and need all the help we can get! In exchange you’ll be one of the first to get our ice cream. Visit our page at www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz

March 22, 2012

Sour Cream Vanilla Bean with Dark Chocolate Cake and Ganache Ribbon

We’ve been talking amongst ourselves over the past couple of months about wanting to collaborate more with some of our friends and fans on creating new flavors. The first collaboration with our friend Heidi Skoog and her Serious Jam was fantastic. We just completed our first fan flavor contest which we’ll be releasing next week, but we’ve also been lucky enough to have more of our compadres in town agree to throw their uber-talent into the mix (no pun intended). And the first of that crew: Sheela Namakkal, the local cupcake genius affectionately known to us as vice president of everything. If you stop down to the beautiful Mitre Box Framing Studio on Saturday mornings for “Cupcake Saturdays” (and we HIGHLY recommend you do) you’ll know why. She rules and her cupcakes rule more.

I have been wanting to do a vanilla bean ice cream with chocolate cake for a long time, and when I finally got around to it, Sheela was the first person I called. And as I expected, I was the one scrambling to figure out how to make the ice cream as good as the ingredients she produced to go in it.

Sheela rocked out some amazing dark chocolate cupcakes. These babies are as hand crafted as it gets and completed with 100% ScharffenBerger cocoa powder. They are DENSE with chocolate.

Dreamy.

To pair, she dreamed up some bitterwseet ganache, with a touch of irish cream and more 100% cocoa.

So much chocolate. So much.

So, it was my job to take this little stash that I so luckily procured, and turn it into ice cream.

First, as you’ve seen us do before, I disassembled the cupcakes into croutons, which were doused in brown butter, a little salt, and baked in the oven until they were crunchy enough to stand up in the cream.

These are far too snackable.

With the cake ready for it’s cream bath, it was time to address the cream itself.

We’ve used many variations of vanilla over the past years, but nothing beats the bean.

To pair with the vanilla, we used our sour cream base to give the typical vanilla flavor a little more depth and tang.

Westby’s is a cooperative creamery in Westby, Wisconsin and have been operating for over 100 years. It has a great flavor and texture, and incorporates seamlessly into our ice cream base. All sour creams are not equal.

The sour cream and vanilla seeds were mixed into the cream, tossed with the dark chocolate cake croutons and layered into the pints with the bittersweet ganache.

The dimensions of deep chocolate, hints of brown butter and salt, acidity from the sour cream and bright vanilla flavor are right in your face. And as Sheela would say, they are also “for your face”.

Want to try it for yourself?

As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (3/23/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck! Also – don’t forget about our Indiegogo fundraising – we’ve got 50 days to go and need all the help we can get! http://www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz?a=446076

February 9, 2012

Maple French Toast with Apricot

Sometimes the biggest treats are only that because of their timing.

As a kid, my mother’s call to dinner was always veiled in a bit of mystery. I rarely paid attention to what was being made, being much more consumed with horsing around with siblings and friends outside or earning the hard money on my after school paper route.

Hunger was a guarantee, and when presented the ever feared cabbage hotdish, a hunger that was guaranteed to linger. But once in awhile, when my mom had exhausted her pantry or simply needed to use something up, that pre-supper time famish was met with the greatest gift of all: breakfast.

Sometimes it was pancakes, others it was scrambled eggs and bacon – and if we hit the jackpot, it was french toast. It was a small victory that engraved itself in my head, and eating a plate of french toast now hearkens the joy of seeing that pile of egg bread on my dinner plate as a kid.

After earning my own french toast stripes with a picky eating three year old of my own, it was time to get this idea into some cream.

There’s something therapeutic about dredging bread in egg. Not sure what. Once everyone’s had their fill the rest (4-5 slices) of the french toast is diced up, baked off and transformed into crunchy little nuggets of breakfast goodness – ready to be bathed in fresh cream.

Ready….

For some added dimension we used these dried apricots from the Seward Co-Op, so sweet they could gag honey, minced into small pieces and tossed in as a dancing partner for our favorite breakfast bread.

Giant fruit candy.

To finish, the french toast croutons and minced apricots are tossed in to the base, and some of our friend maple syrup is added in right at the end to bring the flavor to fruition.

Wild Country Maple Syrup from Lutsen, MN.

Maple French Toast Apricot.

Like to try some? As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (2/10/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!