An Ice Cream Blogger and a Zookeeper Walk Into a Kitchen

Tonight, my friend Jen (the Zookeeper) and her fiancé Tim, who live down the block from me, came over for waffles and ice cream. I made cheesecake ice cream. They brought the waffle iron and batter. In the end, it was a yummy Sunday night snack.

But that cheesecake ice cream required some serious help getting there.

I usually decide what  flavor to make based on having found a recipe that looks delicious. This time, for some reason I did it backwards. I decided to make cheesecake ice cream and then went searching for a recipe. After some googling, I found a recipe that looked good. But it needed some serious doctoring to reach it’s end result.

Cheesecake Ice Cream
Recipe adapted from Ice-Cream-Recipes.com
Makes about 1 1/2 Quarts

Ingredients:
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup sour cream
6 oz. cream cheese
3/4 sugar
3 tbsp. lemon juice
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract

1. Beat cream cheese until smooth.
2. Add sugar and beat together.
3. Add sour cream and beat together.
4. Add heavy cream and beat together.
5. Add lemon juice and vanilla extract and beat together.
6. Decide the custard is way too think (it was more like pudding than batter).

Ingredients redux:
1/3 cup of milk

7. Add milk and stir.
8. Since there’s no eggs in this, taste the custard to your heart’s content.
9. Discover it is way too sour.

Ingredients redux x2:
1/4 cup more sugar

10. Add 1/4-ish cup of sugar and stir.
11. Taste and decide that even if it’s not perfect, you’re just going to freeze it anyway.
12. Freeze as directed.

The ice cream tasted way better frozen, but I felt like it was missing something. So, I took a page from actual cheesecake and make a graham cracker topping for it.

Graham Cracker-y Topping

Ingredients:
3 crushed graham crackers
1/3 cup brown sugar
4 oz. butter

1. Melt butter.
2. Mix together graham cracker crumbs and brown sugar with a fork to break up the brown sugar.
3. Mix in melted butter.
4. Spread on a cookie sheet at 350-ish for 8-ish minutes.
5. Let cool.
6. Crumble up mixture.
7. Put on top of ice cream.

To really complete the dessert, you’ll need to find a friend to make you waffles. But I can’t help you with a recipe for that.