Peaches and Cream Ice Cream

Peaches and Cream Ice Cream

A couple of days ago, I realized I had three small doughnut peaches left over from my last CSA box.  Miraculously they were not super mushy or moldy.  I knew that they didn’t have many days left of being viable, so I thought I’d do something creative with them.

My favorite ice creams are made with cream, milk, sugar, and flavoring – no eggs involved.  I thought I’d try to add these peaches to a basic sweet cream base.  Almonds go nicely with peaches, too, so I thought perhaps I’d add a little almond extract.

The result was a subtle, lightly flavored ice cream that tastes like a bowl of peaches and whipped cream.  It’s far less peach-y than normal peach-flavored ice cream, and doesn’t have a bright orange color, but it’s refreshing and cool and quite tasty!  The only thing I’d consider changing next time would be to cook the peaches slightly before adding them to the ice cream base – I think it would help bring out the ripe peach flavor.  If you didn’t cook them, though, you’d still have a beautiful ice cream to enjoy!

Elisa’s Peaches and Cream Ice Cream

• 2 cups cream
• 1 cup milk
• 1/3 cup + 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1/3-2/3 cup peaches, cut into very small pieces, with juice (raw or slightly cooked)

Mix together all ingredients in the canister of an ice cream maker.  Churn according to the manufacturer’s instructions (mine takes about 35-40 minutes) before moving to an airtight container in the freezer.  This ice cream will stay softer than, say, the avocado one I made a few months ago, so it’s perfect for scooping.

Avocado Ice Cream

We had a ton of avocados from our last CSA box (the next one comes in just three days – hooray!), so we decided to try something completely new. 

 The owner of our favorite ice cream shop (Mariposa Ice Cream in Normal Heights – seriously, if you haven’t been here, you need to!) said a while ago that he’d made avocado ice cream in years past.  Unfortunately the price of avocados had been too high for him to do so recently.  But we had them…

And my parents dug out their (once-used) ice cream maker and gave it to me.

So we had to make avocado ice cream.  We just had to try it.

Overall I trust most recipes from Food Network’s Alton Brown, so we decided to use his (from the Food Network website):

12 ounces avocado meat, approximately 3 small to medium

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

1 1/2 cups whole milk

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup heavy cream

Basically you puree the avocados with the other ingredients and then dump it all in your ice cream maker.  Give it a half hour to spin around and then pop it in the freezer for 6 hours.  No one said it was easy!

But it was pretty tasty.  It tasted better when it was totally frozen (as opposed to just churned).  It was definitely an avocado-flavored ice cream, so it was a little strange.  But tasty and not super sweet.  I will say I probably didn’t churn it enough – it was a little icy – but it was definitely worth trying!