Chocolate-Coated Ice Cream Bars

For Christmas, I received the book Chocolate Recipes and Techniques from the Ferrandi School of Culinary Arts and as part of my chocolate study, I read many of the recipes. While I gained inspiration from in terms of flavour and texture combinations (and will surely return to them in the future), what stood out was the section on frozen desserts. Maybe it's because I'm dreaming of summer, maybe it's because it was different from the other books I've read. Either way, I decided my next foray would be chocolate-coated ice cream bars. 

Now, last week, I blogged about making strawberry ice cream with chocolate fudge brownie pieces. For several years, I've been making a quart of ice cream to enjoy during the summer. Knowing I wanted to try making ice cream bars, I had already ordered a mold from an online retailer. I put the mold to good use, filling four of the eight wells with ice cream before transferring the rest of the mixture into reusable ice cream tubs. (I cut the mold in half to make it easier to work with.) I let these set in the freezer until I had time to coat them in chocolate. On Wednesday evening, despite a long day at work with too many hours on my feet, I decided to carpe the ol' diem and get this done.

Since I had only four ice cream bars and the recipe said it would coat ten, I made half the recipe. It couldn't be simpler. Melt dark chocolate to 40 degrees and then add grapeseed oil. Stir well and dip.

I dipped the first two bars, but found it tricky to get them fully coated because of the vessel I was using to hold the chocolate. For the second two bars, I spooned the chocolate over the ice cream bars. Both methods worked fine provided I took a one-and-done approach. If I tried to re-dip or fill in missed spots, I ended up with a rippled coating. If I were to do this again, I'd make double the required coating, giving myself more to work with.

Once the bars were enrobed, I popped them back into the freezer for 20 minutes to fully solidify. And then I packaged them individually, to be enjoyed on a hot summer day. (Or on a Friday treat day...)

What can I say? They look good. They taste great. 

The viscosity of the chocolate was such that it produced the perfect chocolate shell -- not too thick, not too thin, and perfectly capable of containing ice cream as it begins to soften and melt. And the addition of the grapeseed oil made it easy to bite through the shell, directly out of the freezer. Top marks to the Ferrandi School of Culinary Arts.

Look out, Haagan Dazs, I'm coming for you!  

Strawberry Brownie Ice Cream

Since treating myself to a KitchenAid ice cream maker attachment several years ago (a pandemic indulgence spurred on by my sister and mother), I've made a quart (or so) of ice cream each summer to enjoy. Among the hits have been malted ice cream with crushed Maltesers, sour cherry ice cream with chocolate pieces, and blueberry ice cream with cheese cake bits. I've also tried lemon sorbet, which was especially good with vodka. 

This year, looking to match or surpass the wonder that was blueberry cheese cake ice cream last summer, I got to thinking that strawberry ice cream would be delicious. And then it hit me that the perfect companion would be my mother's chocolate fudge brownies. In addition to being absolutely heavenly, her brownies also don't really freeze even when placed in a cookie can in a deep freezer for several weeks (don't ask how I know this). That means that they shouldn't be rock solid (and unpleasant) in an ice cream mixture. 

After consulting a number of recipes online, I decided to modify the Driscoll's recipe for blueberry ice cream that I liked so much last summer. I bought a pound of fresh strawberries and chopped them before cooking and pureeing them. While they chilled in the fridge with the cream and milk, I mixed up a batch of brownies and baked it on a pizza pan. Once cool, I chopped up a third of the thin brownie into 1cm cubes and froze them. About 24 hours later, we were able to churn the ice cream and layer it in a tub with the brownie pieces. I also molded a few strawberry ice cream bars (no brownie pieces) for a chocolate experiment (stay tuned!). Then into the freezer!

The yield this time consisted of one quart container, two small individual serving containers, and four bars. The flavour is exceptional. There's just nothing like fresh strawberries. 

I definitely will have to buy a box of sugar cones so that I can enjoy a sweet treat throughout the summer!

The Motivation to Try Something New

One of the reasons why I'm enjoying the professional chocolatier course so much is that it's forcing me to try new recipes, techniques, and ingredients that I wouldn't normally make time for. There's no question that I love baking, making confections, crafting, and trying the many pins on my Pinterest boards. But life can be busy and unless there's a special occasion or event that motivates me (like the fundraiser for Little Bear or the library), I often fall into the rut of making the same things all the time. But that's changing.

The assignments in my program are designed to force you to try new things in combinations that you might not have considered before. For example it will identify two types of centre (one a traditional cream ganache, the other a layer of a nut-based centre topped with a layer of ganache) and then three types of finish (painted molded shell, traditional truffle, or enrobed with placed decoration). They also give you master recipes that you are encouraged to modify. So, it becomes a mix and match game of new recipes, techniques, flavours, and finish to meet the requirements. This weekend, for one of my bonbons, I'll be making a marzipan (nut-based) layer topped with espresso ganache (modified master recipe), enrobed in chocolate with a toasted slivered almond placed on top (finish). I'm excited to see how it turns out, but I'm also very nervous about the enrobing process. If you've ever dipped anything in chocolate before (and I have many times), you know how hard it is to get that perfect finish and a minimal "foot" on the finished product (the "foot" is the pool of chocolate that forms while it hardens on a flat surface).

One of my recent successes was making pate de fruits for the first time on a snow day. Since pate de fruits is one of the optional layers for one of the assignments and I've never made it before, I decided I should research some recipes and give it a go. Armed a food processor and a good thermometre, I prepared all of my ingredients and then cooked strawberry-rhubarb juice with sugar until it was "sheeting" off my spoon. I added some lemon juice and an envelope of Certo and quickly poured it into an 8x8 pan lined with parchment. Two hours later I had perfectly set "fruit paste." Cut into squares and tossed in sugar, these are a delicious fruity finish at the end of a meal. (I recently found a recipe for tangerine pate de fruits, so there may be another adventure closer to Easter. I'm also thinking that lemon pate de fruits that have some citric acid mixed in with the sugar to make them sour might be fun.)

This course is also forcing me to visit stores that I've never been to before for ingredients, supplies, and research purposes. And that's showing in my weekly step count. As someone to tends to hibernate during winter, it's been good to have a reason to go out in the evening. While the efficient type A in me can be annoyed that I can't find everything I need in one place, I have been enjoying moments of discovery (like the dried blueberries that cost $50/kg).

Hopefully this motivation around experimentation and getting out and about during winter will last beyond the end of the course!