magazine mondays: salted caramel ice cream!

I’m sure most of you are quite aware of my dangerous addiction to the ice cream shop next door, Willard Scoops.  With the fantastic summer weather we’ve been having, it’s hard not popping over to the shop and getting a scoop of my favorite flavor.  Ice cream is, after all, my all-time favorite food on this earth!  When I saw a recipe for Salted Caramel Ice Cream in one of the most recent issues of Gourmet, I ran out and bought two things I’ve never purchased since cooking for myself: heavy cream and whole milk!

(Salted Caramel is right there next to Chocolate Coconut as one of my absolute favorite flavors at Willard Scoops.  If you haven’t tried either one yet, you should get to Willard Square as soon as you can!)

That bottom left image looks like we were prepared, right?  Nope, sure not!  I enlisted Michael’s help and put him in charge of melting the sugar into the delicious amber-colored caramel.  The plan was for me to prepare the cream mixture and help Michael when things got scary-hot.  A combination of things went wrong… Both Michael and I were so transfixed by the simple act of melting sugar into caramel that my cream concoction boiled over into the stove (flaming, mind you!) and we instantly lost about half of the mixture.  That mess, coupled with the fact that we have yet to purchase a fine sieve (even though now two out of the three Magazine Monday recipes have needed them!), meant that we were severely lacking in cream…

We gave it a go and poured our mostly-caramel-syrup mixture into the ice cream mixer and waited, hoping somehow it would miraculously turn into the ice cream we crave so much at Willard Scoops.  Yeah, not so much… Around 9pm last night, I popped down the street to get a pint of Vanilla Bean for Michael and I to mix with our own “ice cream.”  Our attempt at “ice cream” turned out to be a lovely, rich caramel topping, perfectly paired with the Willard Scoops Vanilla Bean Ice Cream.

Let’s hope for better luck next week!