Orange blossom and drunken cherry ice cream

I recently discovered orange blossom water. It smells great. I think it would make a lovely, inexpensive perfume. But the strength of the smell of it makes it seem a little odd to put in food. It's too - perfumey - to seem like something you'd like to eat. But I'm here to tell you to use this stuff. It's great. I've adapted the drunken cherries with orange blossom chenna that I made previously into an ice cream. And it's a resounding success, if I do say so myself.

After discussing with my friend Dr. Ricky, I decided to start this recipe by making an orange zest extract. If you bought this straight from Absolut, they would no doubt call it Absolut Zest, or Absolut Microplane. Or something.

For 1 quart ice cream, use the zest from:

1 ½ oranges

4 ½ tbsp vodka

Soak overnight, then press through a fine sieve to get out the orange zest chunks.

Save this for later. While it's soaking, you can prepare the custard.

For 1 quart ice cream:

1 cups milk

¾ cup sugar

1 ½ cups heavy cream

½ cup mascarpone cheese

pinch salt

6 large egg yolks

2 tbsp vodka/orange zest infusion (Absolut Zest)

2 ½ tbsp orange blossom water

1/3 cup pistachios

Heat the milk, cream, sugar and salt. Get them nice and warm, stirring constantly, to around 140°F (a kitchen thermometer is inexpensive and will make all of this much easier - so I recommend you get one). Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks into a foamy mess. Slowly pour the warm milk mixture into the beating eggs. If you get this right, you get an emulsion, and increase the odds of getting a custard instead of scrambled eggs. If you're worried about getting this wrong, add the first few bits of hot milk a ladelful at a time. It's less important to go slow as you add more milk, so only the first few ladelfuls need to be done super slow.

When this is all mixed, put back on the stove and heat slowly to 175°F. Stir constantly with a flat-edged spatula so that you're scraping the bottom of the pot.

As soon as it hits 175°F, take it off the stove, and put it into a separate container to stop the cooking immediately. *If* you get this wrong and it starts to curdle, you can still stop the cooking and run an immersion blender through it. It's not ruined if you stop it as soon as you see signs of curdlage. Okay. Now put this custard in the fridge and chill overnight.

Shell the pistachios and chill them so they'll be ready for the big day.

Four to six hours before you're ready to run the ice cream through the ice cream maker, start making the drunken cherries:

1 lb cherries, stemmed, pitted, and quartered

1 tbsp sugar

1 1/2 tsp balsamic vinegar

1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise

4 tbsp sake

Scoop out the yummy smelling vanilla seeds, mix all the ingredients, and refrigerate. Every hour, go in and mix them up a bit. If you let this mix sit too long you'll have cherry soup instead of solid cherries.

At ice cream time, mix the mascarpone cheese, the absolut zest and the orange blossom water into the custard. Run this through your ice cream maker as per your instructions (mine took about 20 minutes to set). Right at the end, fish the vanilla bean out of the cherries. Toss the pistachios into the ice cream maker, then pour in the cherries and cherry juice.

Shut off the ice cream maker as soon as you've added all this good stuff, and pour the whole mixture into a container and toss it in the freezer to harden up.

This is delicious! Fruity. Bright. Fresh. The perfuminess of the orange blossom water mellows properly in the fat of the cream. Really, really tasty. And it loses the texture issues that its forbear has. This was really fun to make. Perhaps the only way this could be better is to make the cherries a bit smaller (as they freeze pretty hard). Yum!

Cardamom, saffron & pistachios.

Nothing says southern-style barbecue like cardamom. Ok, well, maybe cardamom is more an Indian spice. But it's yummy, and as such it falls into the purvey of Indirect Heat.

I'm a *huge* fan of cardamom. The sweet spiciness of it is one of the best flavors we cook with. We often start our weekend mornings with a delicious pot of chai tea. Not the bland, insipid teabags you can buy in the grocery store - but an authentic chai that requires ten minutes of spice grinding to prepare. But that's for another day.

Last week I found a beautiful post over at Tartelette. Cardamom Saffron Ice Cream. I just recently acquired the KitchenAid Mixer Ice Cream Maker Attachment and I'm a gear guy, so combine a recipe with one of my favorite spices and the chance to play with my newest kitchen toy, and, well... I'M IN!

So, first part first, I didn't use the recipe at Tartelette. I modificated it. I love the custard deliciousness of a French style frozen custard ice cream so I custardized the recipe (my favourite ice cream book for this type of info is Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz). And I love cardamom, so I juiced up the cardamom. Here we go.

1 cup milk

3/4 cup sugar

2 cups heavy cream

pinch salt

6 large egg yolks

7 cardamom pods

pinch saffron

1/3 cup raw pistachios

This is a custard. It's a tiny bit tricky. But I'm going to give you all the details that most of the books leave out. Cause they want you to fail. That's the only reason I can think of that no books write down ALL the details you need to succeed at a proper stirred custard. I've failed sufficiently frequently at making yummy custards that I don't want anymore custard failure in the universe. No one will ever love you the way I love you. Ahem. Did I say that out loud?

Okie dokie. Crush the cardamom pods roughly in a mortar and pestle, or with the side of a knife. Warm up the milk, 1 cup of cream, sugar, the salt, and all of the crushed cardamom bits. Get them nice and warm, to around 150-160°F (a kitchen thermometer is inexpensive and will make all of this much easier - so I recommend you get one). Shut off the heat, and leave the cardamom to steep for half an hour or so. Meanwhile, separate the egg yolks, and bring them to room temperature. This part is important. If egg yolks warm too quickly they curdle. Warm 'em slow, and you get deliciousness. Warm 'em fast, and you get scrambled egg in milk.

Beat the egg yolks until they're light and frothy. After steeping, grab a ladle, and beat a ladleful of warm cream gunk into the egg yolks. Whip it into an emulsion. Slowly add the remaining cream mixture bit by bit, until you have a lovely emulsion, yellowish, and lovely and slightly frothy and frothish. Now put it back in the pot, and stir it over low heat with a silicone spatula. Don't stop stirring. Ever. It'll curdle if you stop, so don't. Watch the temperature. If you want a custard, it has to get to between 170 and 175°F. If it hits 185, you're getting scrambled eggs. So keep an eye on that thermometer. As soon as it hits the temperature range you're aiming for, pour it through a strainer into a bowl with the remaining cream, to rapidly cool the custard.

Mix it into the rest of the cream, add the saffron and leave it to cool in the fridge overnight.

24 hours later, run it through your ice cream maker. With the KitchenAid ice cream maker it'll take about 20-25 minutes to get it to the right consistency. That gives you enough time to remove the shells and peels from the pistachios, and chop them to get them a bit smaller.

Click to bigify.

Two minutes before you intend to stop the ice cream maker, add the pistachios. Mix thoroughly, and scoop the ice cream into a container to harden properly in the freezer.

Serve, and win the love and affection of your wife. Best ice cream EVER.