It still took me three tries to get this ice cream just right, with a creamy, full flavor, a detectable level of booze that still allowed the ice cream to set, and ruby bits of cherries that stay soft and gooey. As a result, we now have three quarts of ice cream living in our freezer. When I explained this to my friend Vanessa, she said, “Ah – three days worth of ice cream.” I like the way she thinks.
– Alanna Taylor-Tobin – The Bojon Gourmet
Indeed! This is a beautiful, well thought out, relatively complicated ice cream that looks absolutely fantastic! Make this once and I doubt you will ever buy Cherry Garcia again.
What I like about this recipe:
The combination of flavors is as good as it gets, a bourbon vanilla ice cream base, bourbon roasted sweet, fresh cherries and bittersweet chocolate. This recipe is a first rate example of how to use of liquor in ice cream.
The care with which they are combined to maximize both palate and eye appeal. For example, mixing in the roasted cherries after the bourbon ice cream is almost done churning, in order to get a marbled look to ice cream, rather than the uniform pink of a regular cherry ice cream. Also, rather than adding the chocolate as a mix-in of small chunks, as you would see in Cherry Garcia, Alanna adds beautiful alternate layers of drizzled chocolate, when she moves the ice cream to a container for freezing.
With 4 tablespoons of bourbon, it should maintain a very nice scoop-able consistency in your freezer. The author notes that this ice cream is good for a month of storage, and I believe it, though there is no way an ice cream this good would last a week, even in a single person household.
What do I mean by relatively complicated?
Simply that there are more steps and technique required in making this ice cream, than with simpler ones. You will have to:
- Pit and roast the cherries, and then chill them. Chilling them is essential because of when they are added to the ice cream.
- Make an egg custard based vanilla ice cream.
- Shave and melt the chocolate. The chocolate needs to be runny but not to hot to melt the ice cream. If you follow the instructions given, it should be fine.
- Assemble the ice cream and chocolate in layers, fairly quickly; ice cream has this unfortunate tendency to enjoy melting faster than you would like, especially right out of the ice cream maker. A good spatula will be a must, pre-freezing your container will help, and doing this with a friend should help a great deal.
I wouldn’t let any of this intimidate you, I mean look at the photograph! If you are a fan of these flavors than click over to Alanna Taylor-Tobin’s blog The Bojon Gourmet for the full recipe.
Variations
This is recipe with at least 3 simpler knockout variations readily available just by leaving out one or more ingredients.
Bourbon vanilla ice cream
Bourbon cherry vanilla ice cream
Bourbon vanilla with layers of drizzled chocolate.
iloveicecream.net
Primary Ingredients/Quantity:
Bourbon, vanilla, roasted cherries, chocolate / 1 quart
Mix Prep Time: 1 hour
Freeze Time: 30 min
Total Time: 1 hour 30 min
Yield: 1 quart (8 servings)
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