(Continued from: Adventures in Ice Cream Part 1 – A Little Back Story)

Sometimes vanilla is the perfect flavor. For me, those times are few and far between. For Brian, they’re a little more frequent. And if we’re lucky, they coincide. Our decision to make a simply vanilla ice cream for dessert that night was two-fold:

1. It fit. Very flavorful beefy dinner + gentle creamy dessert = smiles
2. It cut down drastically on the number of variables we would have to deal with to make the ice cream, and hopefully make it good.

Okay, it was more the latter reasoning that prompted the flavor decision. I mean, if we could produce a good, solid, vanilla ice cream, there was serious hope for building a hobby. If we repeatedly fail at vanilla, that hope greatly diminishes. (Plus, we’re not really that talented at pulling together the perfect blend of flavors for a complete meal. We’re more the I-like-this-and-you-like-that–presto! type.)

We dusted off Jeni’s book and flipped to vanilla. Realizing the risk of a serious texture fail if we followed the recipe word for word, we sought modifications from our good friend Google. We were not let down, and thankfully, the fix (or at least experimental tweak #1) was easy – reduce quantities of anything beginning with corn or ending with gum. Excellent! Our recipe called for cornstarch and corn syrup. So we cut those down a bit. We weren’t really scientific about it, just left a bit out… cut it to around 3/4^ths of the original or so. We followed everything else as it was written with a dash of crossed fingers.

Ice cream should be made several hours ahead to allow time to fully harden before serving. This doesn’t tend to mix well with our MO of scrambling to pull everything together last minute (we’re working on that one). So we finished this batch with the minimum ‘several hours’ to freeze before serving – meaning we got to taste the finished product for the first time along with our friends that evening.

Now, our friends could care less whether the ice cream (or the whole meal for that matter) was good. They’re our friends. They’re our friends from college. Think about some of the things you did with your friends in college. Yeah. Those friends. They don’t judge you based on quality of food. And – bonus – they’re typically honest with you.

The result? They liked it! In fact, they actually said it was very good. Of course, we’re our own harshest critics, so I should add: we liked it too! Did we completely nail it? No, not quite. Was it way better than our first batch? Yes, definitely. Was it the launchpad of our latest and greatest addiction hobby? You betcha!

One of the hobbies we’ve picked up over the last few months has been making ice cream. We originally had written down on some to-do list – perhaps even a New Year’s resolution list – that we wanted to “make more ice cream”. It seemed more of a distant when-we-have-more-free-time-hahaha-when-do-we-ever-have-free-time kind of resolution. But then we decided to have our friends over for dinner (because we love our friends, and because it seems to be our only real motivation to clean our apartment, or at least throw everything that was in the living area into the bedroom), and we decided to try making ice cream for dessert. Now, we are not really newbies when it comes to making ice cream. We’ve tried recipes out of several books, including the ice cream maker manual (more info on the ice cream maker in later posts). We’ve experimented ever so slightly on our own, and we’ve gleaned a bit more from the internet. That, however, has still been a fairly sporadic journey spanning several (10?) years and has produced only 3 batches of ice cream that I will confidently describe as really really good. So even though we are not new to making ice cream. We are quite new to making  good ice cream.

Enter Jeni’s Splendid ice cream making book. We found this book about a year ago in a fantastic little store in Durham, NC. We were both instantly drawn to its clean artsy look, the interesting flavors, and the first section describing many of the essential tools and processes of making ice cream. We splurged. We read it cover to cover. We picked out a nice summer flavor to try-Basil and Candied Pine Nuts. And we made it. We followed the directions as exactly as we could. It turned out, well, okay. The flavor was good, but the texture was simply gummy. And yet, it was the kind of ‘okay’ that leaves you thinking you can fix it-that there must be something you can tweak to turn it from ‘okay’ to ‘iscream’. So we were not entirely turned off of her method. But we did put the book down for the rest of the year. We’d look at it now and again, but we were busy, and we didn’t have time to tweak recipes, and we were always full of excuses.

That is until we decided to try it – let’s see if we can get it right – for our friends.

(Read on: Adventures in Ice Cream Part 2 – Vanilla Can Still Be an Adventure)