with apologies to all of us starting the cleanse tomorrow (and extra apologies to heather)…

last weekend, i made two more recipes from jeni’s splendid ice creams at home.  the one pictured above is her kona stout. those of you who know me in real life know that i generally don’t care for alcohol or coffee, so this flavor choice was chosen largely with my dear mr. happy stuff in mind.  however,  i splurged on the stout and got southern tier’s creme brulee stout and discovered that it was actually quite tasty and very drinkable on its own!  granted, i still couldn’t drink very much of it (wow, is it rich!), but since even the double recipe that i made only used a cup of it, someone had to help mr. happy stuff finish off the rest of the bottle….

this ice cream actually turned out less creamy than any of the others i made and i’m not sure if it was the quality of the cream (the bottle had frozen in the back of my fridge and separated when it thawed) or if it was the alcohol content slowing down the freezing process (it took waaaaaaay longer than any other batch i’ve made!).  nevertheless, the final product is still rich, bitter like iced coffee and very tasty.

the other batch i made was backyard mint.  this recipe required “steeping” the mint in the ice cream base overnight, and everyone who tasted it exclaimed about how much it tasted like real mint tea instead of mint extract.  this one might be my favorite so far.  very refreshing and a perfect end to a meal.

oh, and the cookies?  jeni only includes one cookie recipe in her book, but then she recommends a “chocolate fudge” cookie to match the mint ice cream, so i poked around on the web and found this recipe from serious eats and, although the cookies i made look nothing like the photo in that link (maybe i mis-interpreted the instruction to whip the eggs “until thick”?) they do make a fantastic, rich, chocolatey, chewy-even-when-frozen ice cream sandwich cookie.  i froze them before packing the ice cream onto them and that helped the cookies to maintain their shape while the sandwiches were being constructed, but by the time you eat them, they are just the perfect texture, sort of molding themselves to the ice cream each time you take a bite.  i made a variety of sizes, from about 3″ in diameter to about 1.25″ in diameter because sometimes you really only need a teeny, tiny bit of ice cream sandwich to really hit the spot.

ok.  cleanse week commencing in 10 minutes.  gotta go.