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If you’ve read posts from our adoption blog, you probably saw the angel food cake recipe and egg yolk recipes I posted. I love to bake and trying new desserts so I was really excited to experiment with those recipes.
Well, hang on to your hats, folks, because I found another delicious recipe (or two…) to use up your extra egg yolks! Read on for a creamy and delicious homemade vanilla ice cream recipe.
Ten or 11 years ago, I got a KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker attachment for Christmas to go with my beautiful cobalt blue KitchenAid mixer. Then it promptly disappeared.
Until a couple months ago.
My mom found it while cleaning out a closet and brought it over. So naturally, that meant visiting my BFF, Pinterest, for all the ice cream recipes.
I tried this one first, from Chocolate Chocolate and More. Because chocolate.
It was SUPER rich. Two different types of chocolate in a custard style ice cream. So decadent! Hard to eat more than a few bites, but you know, sometimes you just have to force yourself to do the unpleasant things…
Once I’ve tried a recipe, I like to research it and create my own from what I’ve seen elsewhere and what I’ve experienced in my own trial.
So that’s what I did when I decided I needed to try a classic homemade vanilla ice cream recipe. Vanilla ice cream is such a perfect palette for countless toppings and sauces. It’s an excellent choice to keep on hand at home.
Especially on those days when your husband decides he wants to make brownies for dessert. Yum!
This recipe could also be used as a base for an endless number of mix-ins: cookies and cream, cookie dough, various candy, fruit… The list could go on forever!
And this is why I suggest in my recipe to only add part of the sugar to the milk mixture. Once you’ve got your milk and cream mix heating on the stove, taste it. If it seems like it might be too sweet once you’ve added your desired extras, don’t add that last bit of sugar to the egg yolks.
Ingredients
- 2 c whole milk
- 2 c heavy whipping cream
- ¾ c sugar, divided
- Pinch of salt
- 1 tbsp vanilla
- 4 egg yolks
Instructions
- Add milk, cream, ½ cup sugar, and salt to a medium saucepan. Heat to a simmer, until steaming and bubbling slightly just around the edges. (You can taste your mixture at this point to see if it needs the extra sugar in the next step.)
- Whisk the egg yolks in a medium bowl until combined. Add the last ¼ cup sugar (if necessary), and whisk until combined.
- While whisking, slowly add about 1 cup of the milk mixture to the beaten yolks, about ¼ cup at a time, to temper the eggs so they don’t cook when you put them into the saucepan. Then pour the egg/milk mixture into the pan and stir constantly over a medium heat until the mixture reaches a temperature of 165 – 170 degrees. It should coat the back of a spoon. (If you have a food thermometer, I highly recommend using it! It takes the guesswork out of so many recipes.)
- Place a strainer over a heat safe bowl, and pour the custard mixture through the strainer to catch any bits that may have been cooked during the heating process. Place the bowl in an ice bath to cool to room temperature. Cover (I usually put plastic wrap directly on top of the surface as well as using the bowl’s lid to prevent a skin from forming, like I do with my pudding, but I don’t know that it’s absolutely necessary…) and refrigerate for at least 4 hours, or overnight.
- Churn your delicious ice cream mixture according to your ice cream maker manufacturer’s instructions. If you’re using any kind of yummy mix-ins, add those in the last 5 minutes of churning.
- At this point, your ice cream will be like a very soft soft serve. Delicious and edible to be sure, but if you have any patience at all, you will want to put it into a freezer safe container and place in your freezer to let it harden.
If you wanted to get all fancy-like, you could use a vanilla bean and get all those little specks in your ice cream. In the first step, you would just split one vanilla bean lengthwise, scrape the seeds into the milk mixture, add the vanilla bean too, and let it simmer. The vanilla bean will be removed when the custard mixture is strained. If you want to keep the flavor infusing, you can put it in the bowl with the custard mixture while it cools in the fridge, and remove it when you start mixing it in the ice cream maker.
This would be a perfect dessert to follow my lasagna or taco pizza recipes!
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