We’ve been making gallons and gallons of ice cream in the past months. We have a 2-quart Cuisinart ice cream maker and have lately tried making malted ice cream.

First, my base sweet cream recipe:

  • 2 cups (1 pint) heavy cream
  • 2 cups (1 pint) other dairy
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1/8 tsp salt
  • (optional) 6 egg yolks

I like a really high-fat ice cream, so I use 18% table cream as my “other dairy.” Sometimes this can get a little rich. If you’re using the egg yolks (and therefore cooking your ice cream base), then using whole milk should be fine. If you’re doing a Philadelphia-style, egg-less base, then the higher fat content helps keep a nice creamy texture. Remember that when you use egg yolks, be sure to heat the custard to 170F to fully pasteurize the eggs!

To this base you can add all sorts of stuff. Our favourite egg-less combination is vanilla mint. We add 1–2 tsp vanilla extract and 2 tsp mint extract. If you love chocolate, reduce the sugar slightly and add 8 oz melted chocolate to the custard before pasteurizing the egg.

Oh, and we tried gingerbread ice cream , too! Wow! Absolutely wonderful!

Malt has been a new foray for us. We’ve tried two recipes, both cooked. The first was a straight vanilla malt with 1 tsp vanilla extract and 2/3 cup of dark malt powder. Adele loved it, but I found the malt flavour way too strong. The other day we did a chocolate malt. This time we only used 1/3 cup of malt powder and it’s just about perfect for me. We used a lower-quality chocolate, and that’s detracting from the final product somewhat, but the next batch will be perfect.

Apparently you can also make the ice cream with malt syrup. The next try will be 1 cup malt syrup to 4 cups dairy. We’ll let you know how it goes.

BTW, the only place we could find malt powder and syrup was at a wine-/beer-making shop. Adele loves Whoppers candy. I need to see if I can find a recipe for those, too!