Homemade Syrups for Sodas and Ice Creams

By West Village Bill

I bought Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home—the cookbook from Ohio-based ice cream maven Jeni Britton Bauer—back in June, and I've been using it as inspiration all summer. I haven't yet tried any of her more unusual flavors, like Sweet Basil & Honeyed Pine Nut or Cucumber, Honeydew, & Cayenne, but I've followed her very simple yet fullproof recipe to make fruit syrups that I've then swirled into ice creams and used as the base for homemade sodas.

I first made Jeni's Blackberry Syrup by boiling two parts berries to one part sugar and forcing the resulting mixture through a strainer after it had cooled a bit. After it was chilled, I layered it into my homemade vanilla ice cream to create Vanilla Ice Cream With Blackberry Swirl. On a whim, I poured the little syrup I had left into a glass and added club soda. It was awesome, so I bought a whole lot of blackberries at the Greenmarket the next weekend and made a big batch of syrup for soda.

I then went on to make peach and raspberry syrups and to try creating peppermint and lemon verbena syrups. The peach was my favorite. It was delicious in soda ...

Ice Cream Sunday

By West Village Bill

This Sunday is Ice Cream Sunday at the New Amsterdam Market at the old Fulton Fish Market. For 25 smackers, you'll get to try eight flavors produced by ice cream makers from New York and the surrounding region, including Ben Van Leeuwen of Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream, Fany Gerson of La Newyorkina and Gabrielle Carbone of Princeton, New Jersey's The Bent Spoon. For 10 bucks more, you'll get 10 mini cones instead of eight, and you'll be able to start eating at noon instead of 1. Proceeds benefit the market itself, which gives an amazing variety of local vendors a chance to sell their wares. You must buy tickets in advance.

I'm going with my sister, Tracey, and my nephews, Mike and Matt. I'm hoping, though I'm not going to bet, that they'll tell me no one else's ice cream can beat Uncle Bill's. :-)


Cone illustration via the New Amsterdam Market website

Lemon Verbena Ice Cream

By West Village Bill

The summer has been flying by, and what with my crazy move, I've been too busy to make ice cream or get to the Jersey shore. To rectify the latter situation, I'll be heading to Cape May with my New Jersey buddies Dan and Paul on Friday. Woot! And over this past weekend, I made my first ice cream since the official start of summer. It was flavored with lemon verbena, and it was fantastic.

I first made Lemon Verbena Ice Cream last summer after seeing a sign at the Berried Treasures stand at the Union Square Greenmarket suggesting that that herb was terrific in ice cream. Berried Treasures is the only stand I've come across that offers LV, maybe because around here it has to be overwintered inside. Or so I've read on the Internets. I should ask the woman from BT whether she does that or protects it from frost in some other way.

Butterscotch, Mint Chocolate Chip, and Mocha Ice Creams

By Brooklyn Bill

The weather doesn't have to get too warm to get me in the mood for cranking out the ice cream like a goy Ben or Jerry. A few weeks ago, I made Butterscotch Ice Cream that was an improvement over my previous, not-bad-at-all attempt back in February. Then I made my all-time favorite flavor, Mint Chocolate Chip, because fresh peppermint had returned to the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket and my friend who is the most enthusiastic about my MCC was coming to visit. And on Monday, I made Mocha Ice Cream for the first time, partly in anticipation of a visit from my father this coming weekend.

I made the butterscotch kind the same way as in the recipe in the Hawleyblog post I linked to above except I used all (1 cup of) brown sugar in the egg-yolk mixture. So between that and the caramel base, this ice cream was totally brown sugar–rific.

Three Delicious Desserts With Vanilla Beans in Common

By Brooklyn Bill

I've been cranking out the Vanilla Fudge Ice Cream the past couple of weeks like Republicans spew out bullshit. I made some a week ago Monday that I'd planned to take to my Granny (she's my Dad's mother) for her birthday, which was on Groundhog Day. I usually go down to South Jersey the weekend between Granny's birthday and my Mom's, which is tomorrow, Feb. 11. But the snowstorm last weekend, which mostly missed the city, hit down there in a big way. So I canceled my rental car and stayed away.

I took some of the ice cream to the Gamesters on Sunday, and they devoured it. And I made a second batch of vanilla fudge over that weekend to take with me the next time I'm able to arrange a three-day weekend and can visit the birthday gals.

Vanilla fudge is one of my regular flavors, and I've gotten it down to a T. I use the Classic Vanilla Bean Ice Cream recipe from Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Library: Ice Creams & Sorbets with no alterations other than to double it. The custard consists of only half-and-half, sugar, and egg yolks plus the star of this post: vanilla beans.

If you've never cooked or baked with vanilla beans, you've been missing out on a wonderful sensual experience (cue the food-porn music): the intense, complex aroma; the moisture of the pod and the oils that attach to your fingers; and the tiny seeds that come out of the pod in clumps on the tip of your kitchen knife.

An Alcoholic Ice Cream and a Creamy Alcoholic Drink

By Brooklyn Bill

A couple of weekends ago, I made a flavor of ice cream I'd never attempted before: eggnog. I based it on the recipe for (predictably) Eggnog Ice Cream in Claudia Fleming's The Last Course and the Simplified Eggnog recipe in Dale DeGroff's The Essential Cocktail.

That Simplied Eggnog recipe is, in turn, based on DeGroff's recipe for Brandy Milk Punch, an eggless holiday drink containing cognac, milk, simple syrup, vanilla, and nutmeg that sounded completely delicious. So I shook one of them up last night to break in my new cocktail shaker.

Chocolate-and-Spice Treats for the Holidays

Posted by Brooklyn Bill

Chocolate-and-spice—especially chocolate-and-ginger—is a favorite flavor combination of mine. In this post, I'm going to do a wrap-up of chocolate-and-spice treats I've made around the holidays the past few years, with links to the full stories on my personal blog. It's sorta like one of those lame-ass sitcom episodes in which they repeatedly flash back to things that happened in other episodes so they don't have to write that much new material. Only with 100% less lame-ass-ness and absolutely no clips of Kirk Cameron as Mike Seaver!

My favorite cookies of all time are Martha Stewart's Chocolate-Gingerbread Cookies. I also love to make ice cream; during the spring and summer, I typically make 6 to 10 batches of various flavors (and I'll make the occasional batch in fall and winter). So it was probably inevitable that I'd eventually get the big idea to make an ice cream version of the cookie. The results, I gotta say, were pretty damn good.

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