Twin Cities Ice Cream

October 3, 2013

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. 🙂

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

August 22, 2013

Roasted Carrot

We’re hitting our end and we’ll continue with everyone’s favorite orange root. Carrots. Harvest time carrots are the best, and there’s no other time to get that carrot-y flavor out than now. This has been one we’ve wanted to do for years, and we finally got to it on our list.

These babies are gorgeous, and I can’t get enough of them during this time of the year. We grill them, eat them raw, slice, shredded..but nothing is better than roasted in the oven. The sweetness that comes out of the carrot during this process is incredible, and was the inspiration for this flavor.

So that’s what we did. We roasted them in the oven in butter until they got all caramelly.

Then they went for a spin in the food processor, and we’re mixed into our brown sugar base. The brown sugar brings the brown butter and the roasted carrot flavor out even more.

And this is our reward – an extremely rich and creamy, roasted carrot ice cream that sings with a deep roasted caramel flavor and ends with a nice carrot kick.

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 8/23/13 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!

July 25, 2013

Grilled Cheeseburger

Yes, really!

The whole idea of our weekly flavor was born from a challenge to ourselves, to concept and create on a regular basis, over a long term. This is how we keep our minds fresh, fuel our curiosity, make our breakthroughs and hone our skills. It also meant we would ultimately begin to challenge our own paletes, as well as our followers’ in the process. And because we’re willing to walk out on a limb here and there, we get a lot of funny suggestions for flavors. Sometimes we actually entertain them. Sometimes we don’t. In this case…

This flavor wasn’t created as a gimmick or as a joke, in fact, it was created out of pure desire to see if we could make something this far out, actually taste good. We realize that the public’s taste for Cheeseburger ice cream might be nil, but much of the point of these weekly releases are to give you an idea of our thought process when we concept, and ultimately create a flavor. Once in awhile our ideas fall flat, and those get left on the kitchen floor, never to be posted here or created at all for that matter. This one, in our opinion, did not.

It all started with a discussion on the consumption of shakes and malts while enjoying a burger and fries. Many of you willingly slurp down ice cream as a means to wash down a cheeseburger, even dipping fries in it. In some ways, the meal and the dessert are synonymous. So why wouldn’t this flavor work? We had to try.

The concept was narrowed down to a few important factors.

1. No physical meat in the final product

2. Somehow make the ice cream taste reminiscent of a grilled cheeseburger, while still allowing ice cream to be, well, ice cream

We agreed that steeping a burger would be the approach to get the flavorful fat and flavor to soak into the cream- the beef, the smoke, the char, and the cheese.

So, we had some cheeseburgers.

Obviously we start with quality ground beef, and Grass Run Farms is a good one. The burgers went on a hot charcoal grill and were topped with Wisconsin Cheddar. We ate some of the cheeseburgers. Then we took the two left over and kept them to steep in the ice cream base.

Being Wisconsin boys, we knew there had to be more cheese, so we tailored our ice cream base to accept more of this fine cheddar along with the grilled grass fed patties.

Don’t worry, we didn’t forget the bun. For this, we took our favorite New French Brioche Buns and baked them off into croutons with some help from our friends butter and salt. They went in at the end of the churn.

And here it is. A creamy, dense cheddar cheese ice cream steeped with charcoal grilled, grass fed beef patties and specked with brioche bun croutons. A sweet ice cream that ever so subtly reminds you of a cheeseburger.

Of course, you want to know – what did we think? It IS good. Honestly it wouldn’t be my first choice, and isn’t for eating in mass quantities – but its a blast to try and experience the brain tease.
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 7/25/13 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!

March 7, 2013

Caramel Popcorn Candied Almond

Its been awhile since we’ve done a collaboration, so we’re excited to be back at it with none other than Twin Cities fantastic Stephanie Meyer. When she isn’t running her spectacular blog Fresh Tart, she’s writing for Andrew Zimmern’s Kitchen Adventures on FoodandWine.com, contributing to Minneosta Monthly, and can generally be found somewhere around town, cooking, taking photos, writing, dining or all of the above. Let’s just say she’s scrubbed laziness from the Thesaurus. Anyway, we met a few years back and our mutual passion for all things food quickly had us scheming on flavors. Talks of collaboration on a flavor followed, so I asked Steph to send us some of her current favorite flavors or ingredients as a catalyst for this collab. An email returned to my inbox with the following:

Popcorn

Almonds

Caramel

Brown Butter

There were more potential flavors on this list, but these were the only ones that I saw. Translation: Poppycock! At least that’s how I first imagined it – popcorn (awesome) and nuts (even better) all covered in caramel and/or toffee (party). We were going to hearken back to one of our first flavors on this blog -Brown Butter Popcorn – and make a Poppycock version of it. Time to make some ice cream.

First. The popcorn. Popcorn is a mutual staple in Steph’s and our households and we’re both fans of flavoring it with brown butter. It was an obvious choice as the main elements of the ice cream base.

The first step in making this particular base is taking fresh pan popped pop corn, not microwave popcorn, or air popped, but popped old school in a pot with hot oil. Why? Because you get the most natural, classic popcorn flavor from the oil cooking the corn over heat. Microwave popcorn is totally out of the question for many reasons, (no thanks butter “flavor”) and airpopped just won’t provide enough oomph. Once it’s popped, we pulverized it in a blender and then mixed into the base and steeped to extract as much of the flavor into the cream as possible.

While the base is heating/steeping, brown butter is whisked in. The brown butter is such an incredible flavor on its own, and combined with salt makes the popped corn flavor much more prevalent, which is exactly what we want.

Boiling sugar.

For this flavor we’re sticking with a classic caramel – with plenty of salt.

We chose to candy the almonds whole, since the true prize of poppycock is the toffee coated nuts. The caramel is swirled into the brown butter popcorn base and the nuts are peppered throughout.

The moral of the story? Ice Cream is just as right for a cold, snowy night in March as it is a warm dusk in late June. Popcorn, Brown Butter, Almonds, Caramel mean victory. This one is a champ. A buttery, popcorn infused ice cream with heaps of whole, candied almonds and ribbons of salty, gooey caramel.

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 3/8 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!

February 14, 2013

Rose with Cinnamon Honey

Happy Valentines Day!! This week we really wanna say thanks to all who continue to follow us and dig what we’re doing. We love you! Will you be our valentine? Be mine. Hug me. Cutie Pie. Lets Kiss. Be True. Sweetheart. Love Me. Seriously though, love you. And since we love you, and it’s Valentines Day and all, we thought we would give you roses on this special day. Not roses though. Rose ice cream. Rose ice cream with cinnamon honey. Let’s get started…

Rose buddies! It’s not really the season to find fresh rose buds suitable for cooking with, so we’re using dried. Don’t worry sweetie pie, the flavor is all there. For our rose ice cream base, we use plain organic cane sugar, and steep the rose buds in the cream. The buddies get strained out, and the mix is ready for the churn.

Next, we make our cinnamon honey. For this batch we’re using our last jar of local honey from Nordeast Nectars. We heat to thin out so that we can easily incorporate the cinnamon. Done! The cinnamon honey gets layered into the pints during packaging.

Happy Valentines Day! We made you rose ice cream layered with cinnamon honey. The rose flavor is floral and earthy while the cinnamon honey balances the bouquet with a touch of sweetness and spice. For real though, we love you! Hearts, Frozbroz

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 2/15 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!