Twin Cities Ice Cream – Page 2

January 31, 2013January 29, 2024

Lime w/ Macadamia and Ginger Caramel

We are going to keep the beach vibes going this week to shed more warmth on these harsh winter months. Recently we rolled out our Coconut & Mangosteen Caramel, Jasmine Citrus Saffron and Georgia Walnut. This week, we’re back at it with another tropical inspired flavor jumble with our Lime w/ Macadamia and Ginger Caramel. Let’s do this!

Lime lime! Limes! Lime! So these are limes. First, we zest. Then, roll them out and juice em. The juice is poured into a sauce pan with equal parts sugar, then reduced into a syrup. The syrup and lime zest are both added to our ice cream base to ensure full lime limeness. It’s ready for the churn.

Ginger! I had been watching Top Chef a few weeks back and for those who are familiar, there are contests every episode called “quickfire” challenges. This one in particular made use of ginger. Someone on the show made a ginger caramel, and I instantaneously knew that this was going in one of our next flavors. This week’s flavor was designed around the idea of this ginger caramel. The process was not divulged on the show, but we’ve made caramel hundreds of times, and intuition had me peeling and grating the ginger first.

Next, the ginger got heated with cream, steeped to fully infuse, and then strained out of the cream. Next, we made a traditional caramel by boiling plain granulated sugar until caramelized. The ginger-infused cream is then added into the boiling caramelized sugar, salted, and bang-go! Ginger caramel!

Our last addition – macadamia nuts. They add texture and crunch. Their nutty buttery flavor hits at the end of each bite. We keep them plain and simple, and add into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

The results are in…rich and creamy lime ice cream layered with salty ginger caramel finished with the crunch and nuttiness of buttery macadamia nuts. Summer’s favorite flavor? Nah, winter’s favorite flavor.

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 2/1 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!

January 17, 2013

Jasmine Citrus Saffron

We flavor storm a ton of ideas for our weekly flavors each month, and many times they get pushed aside for a better one, or just get caught up in the mix of too many ideas. This week, we revisit one of those flavors that we left behind as it breathes life into this cold winter month, and conjures up images of warmth and color. Let’s get started with this weeks flavor: Jasmine Citrus Saffron

There are countless varieties of rice, all of which have their own special flavor and textural characteristics. Steeping rice in our cream works great, as all those unique flavors inundate the cream. We wanted this flavor to feel light and perfumed, so we decided to use Jasmine rice as one of our base components. Jasmine has a natural sweet floral tone to it that seemed fitting to pair with the floral honey-esk flavors of saffron. We par-cooked the jasmine, then steeped in our cream along with the saffron threads, creating the backbone for our ice cream base. The rice gets strained after the steep, and our base is ready for the churn.

It’s citrus season in California and Florida, and in keeping with our theme to stay warm and light, we wanted to make a citrus syrup to layer into our jasmine/saffron base. The oranges, grapefruit, lemon and limes first get zest-ed, then juiced.

The citrus juice, zest and sugar are heated in a sauce pan and steeped. The zest is strained out, and the simple syrup is reduced into a syrup that is similar to honey or maple syrup in consistency. This tart citrus syrup is cooled and layered into the jasmine/saffron ice cream during packaging.

Bang-go! Sweet, creamy and floral jasmine/saffron infused ice cream with a tart citrus syrup. It’s just another flavor that was almost left behind, but now, will give you summer’s warmth during our coldest months of winter.

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 1/18 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!

January 10, 2013

Coconut & Mangosteen Caramel

We’re entering the middle of January when the true doldrums of a Midwestern winter take hold, and you can’t help but dream of a warm paradise somewhere closer to the equator. With no sunny beach in my future for this winter, I get my kicks by enjoying the fruits (no pun intended) of such places to remind me of what I could have. Maybe its a bit sadistic, but I enjoy it. As an aside, in the 90 odd flavors we’ve put up on this blog so far, we have yet to do one friendly to the dairy free and vegan audiences. This marks our first flavor in both of those categories.

I first was introduced to the strange fruit through a short story in one of my college lit classes (the title of which I’ve forgotten) and have always been curious about it. Native to Indonesia and South America, for a long time they were illegal in the U.S. due to fears of harboring Asian fruit fly. You can find them fresh now, but you’ll still have to do some hunting. Since we weren’t able to get our hands on any fresh, we went the canned route (we’re making a caramel with them anyway) and picked them up with our coconut milk at our often lauded haunt – United Noodles.

Again with the little brains. What does this mean?

For this flavor we chose to do a Mangosteen caramel that would be layered into the base and provide a truly tropical version of a coconut caramel.

Hinted with a bit of fresh ginger

The mangosteen was pureed and strained to remove the seeds and fibers, and then combined with the fresh ginger, sugar and boiled down into a nice flowable caramel.

Next, the coconut ice cream. Coconut milk works wondefully for a dairy free/vegan option because it has a high enough fat content to freeze without being icy. With organic cane sugar and some organic vanilla, you’d never know the difference. (As long as you don’t loathe coconut).

Finally after churning the coconut base, the Mangosteen caramel was layered in as the pints were packed.

What we end up with is a deliciously creamy coconut ice cream with a bright, lightly fruity, mangosteen caramel.

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 1/11 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!

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!

December 6, 2012

Spiced Nuts

We’re continuing our holiday flavor tour this week with another nut infused ice cream. We got inspired back in October with our Black Walnut ice cream, and since, have been on a nut-infused ice cream making rampage. To go along with our holiday theme, we thought we would make a mixed bag and spice it up a little bit. After all, who doesn’t love a holiday party with a bowl of spiced nuts on the table? Let’s get this holiday party started right with this week’s flavor: Spiced Nuts.

Nuts! Raw nuts! From light to dark: Cashews, Almonds, Pecans. These make up the backbone of this flavor adding both rich flavors and creamy texture with all those natural nut oils.

First things first, nuts get laid out on a sheet pan and into the oven for a roast. The roasting brings out all those nutty flavors we are all familiar with.

After the roast, the nuts get crushed in the food processor, and then into our ice cream base for a hot steep. The mix gets chilled down in an ice bath and the crushed nuts get strained out, for a smooth nut cream base.

Now that we have our nut-infused ice cream we can get down to putting some spice into those nuts. Shortly after conceiving the idea for this week’s flavor, the December issue of Food and Wine magazine showed up, and what was in it? A nice recipe for Sugar-and-Spice Nuts. We liked it so much that we decided to use the three spices used in the recipe to spice up our nut cream. Check the recipe out for yourselves right here: Sugar-and-Spice Nuts. In the picture above starting at the bottom, moving clockwise: Cayenne Pepper, Chili Powder and Cinnamon. The spices get mixed into our nut cream along with a generous salting. Into the maker for a churn.

The result is a rich creamy nut-infused ice cream with a salty sweet and ever-so-slightly spicy finish.

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 12/07 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!