November 2011 – FROZBROZ

November 24, 2011

Pumpkin Pie

Happy Thanksgiving y’all! Being Thanksgiving today, it should be of no surprise that our second installment of holiday inspired flavors is non other than pumpkin pie. Or is it a surprise? We just had to. Yes, we could have gone all FrozBroz on you and made a pumpkin feta with fried sage, but we couldn’t resist the obvious…it’s a Thanksgiving tradition.

Pumpkin: Probably the most recognized symbol of harvest time here in the United States. For those unaware, that pumpkin in the can comes from one of these beauties right here…which came from Featherstone Farms in Rushford Village, MN.

Roast it, mash it, add eggs, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, ginger and cream. What do you get?

Pumpkin Pie!

Pumpkin has a lot of moisture content, which doesn’t react well in ice cream, but after it’s baked into a custard pie, no problem.

Pie crust = good

Graham Cracker Crust = Fan-friggin-tastic!

Here we have crushed graham crackers, butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves and salt ready to be mixed up and baked off.

Graham cracker crust – another great stand alone ice cream flavor.

Here we toss it in at the end for a little salty crunch.

It’s all here! Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream.

Want to try? As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints. 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 (11/25/2011) 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!

November 17, 2011

Cranberry Compote Quark + Toasted Walnuts

Let the festivities begin.

The seasons constantly drive our creativity in some form or another. In the Spring, Summer, and Fall we get to take advantage of the growing season and the harvest. In the Winter we’re driven first by the holidays and then by the pure, unadulterated boredom that follows until Spring. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The holidays are in front of us and this is one of our first flavors drawn from traditional holiday fare.

Sometimes, its a matter of taking a few staple ingredients and figuring out how to make them just a little more interesting. In this case, we knew we wanted to use cranberries in a flavor leading up to Thanksgiving.

A few years ago I made a cheesecake topped with a Cranberry compote to bring to the Thanksgiving feast and I thought it would be an interesting approach to an ice cream flavor.

Awfully pretty in their fresh state, no?

To start, the compote. To nip the bitterness of the cranberries’ in the proverbial bud, this particular compote leans on lemon juice and lemon zest.

Compote…

In place of a cheesecake crust, we opted for crushed walnuts toasted on the dark side and lightly candied with brown sugar.

Not a bad snack either…

Finally, to get the whole dimension of the cheesecake, we opted for some Quark cheese from Milton Creamery in Iowa. It needs to be noted that Milton is the home of one of our favorite cheeses in the land (Prairie Breeze). Both can be found at our almost daily haunt, the Seward Co-Op in South Minneapolis.

Quark is a fresh, soft cheese similar to cream cheese but has a tangier flavor that stands out better in ice cream. In this case some was blended into the base of the cream, and some of the quark was frozen ahead of time and crumbled into the base for an extra rich bite here and there.

Its more fun to say “Quark” anyway.

Lastly, the compote was layered in the pint as the ice cream went in.

A nice red compliment to the white cream…if we do say so ourselves.

Want to try? As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints. 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 (11/10/2011) 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!

November 10, 2011

German Chocolate Cake In Your Ice Cream

Every year I make a German chocolate cake for my mother-in-law’s birthday. It’s been her birthday cake tradition for as long as my wife can remember. Along with this cake, I’ve been making a coffee ice cream to accompany it, which pairs nicely with the espresso in the cake batter itself. I mean, I totally feel sorry for you if you don’t like the combination of coffee and chocolate. My mother in-law? She loves the coffee and chocolate combo, and so the tradition lives on.

Ironically, inspiration from this yearly tradition has inspired us to do something nontraditional. Instead of serving you cake and ice cream, we’re serving cake IN your ice cream – German chocolate cake in your ice cream that is.

Lets get this party started. Lets get this party started right. Chocolate/Coffee cake style.

Probably my favorite part about this cake is the inner filling. It starts with shaved coconut and toasted pecans. Add sugar, egg yolks, evaporated milk, and vanilla…

…this mixture is cooked on the range until it’s thick enough to coat the back of a spoon – aka nappé.

I could eat this for breakfast.

After slicing the cake in half, I spread filling on the bottom half.

Throw on the top…

Oh yeah! Ganache! How could we forget? This is the same stuff we use to make our cocoa truffles for our Peace Coffee Cocoa Truffle ice cream. Devine Fair Trade Chocolate whipped with hot cream until smooth and velvety.

Happy Birthday Babs!

Covered in ganache and ready to slice.

Two frozen slices of German chocolate cake ready to be packed with coffee ice cream. Another FrozBroz original – German Chocolate Cake In Your Ice Cream.

And as every week previous, you can win one of two available pints of this weeks 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 (11/10/2011) 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!

November 3, 2011

Apple Fritter Apple Fritter

The apple fritter is one of the best things ever fried by man.

A few weeks ago, I attended a breakfast which happened to include a glorious platter full of a wide variety of donuts. Cake donuts , Raised donuts, Crullers, Bismarcks…the gamut. Only one problem. Actually a major problem. There was only one apple fritter sitting on top of that pile, like an anchor keeping the rest from floating away, and before my gluttonous brain had time to signal my hands into action, it was gone.

The loss instantly triggered a quest for top notch fritters in the Twin Cities, and a recent jackpot trip to Mel-O-Glaze in South Minneapolis found me standing in front of a pile of them “fresh out the fryer”.

However, the plans for them mostly included ice cream. Truthfully that was the only plan. The goal was to see if we could make an ice cream that fully and accurately represented all of the goodness that is the Apple Fritter. Which meant more than just simply throwing chunks of them into a cream.

It also had to pay off some of the willpower it was going to take to not eat my way through the bag I just bought.

I will repeat: willpower.

As we do in many of our flavors that incorporate a baked good, a few of these fritters were cubed and baked off in the oven until they were dried out and crunchy. Unfortunately, this process actually made them even better, and harder to resist.

Little nuggets of pure gold.

As you might remember from the Apple Crisp flavor a few weeks back, we had some fantastic heirloom Wolf River apples we roasted and as it happened there were a few left. A nice little extra apple flavor to pair with the fritter.

Finally my favorite part – the last of the fritters were thrown into the cream base, to take a nice long bath and leech all of their apple frittery essence into the base.

This is where the Apple Fritter gets doubled up.

What we ended up with was nothing but apple fritter. Apple fritter ice cream, littered with chunks of roasted apples and apple fritter croutons.

And as every week previous, you can win one of two available pints of this weeks 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 (11/4/2011) 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!