caught being guilty

After spending hours and hours trying to decide what on earth would qualify as a "guilty pleasure" food (to the point where Somebody reminded me that the baking challenge shouldn't take over my life) I finally decided that chocolate ice cream, GOOD chocolate ice cream, would fit the bill for me. It is something that I rarely buy, but love to eat. And when I DO buy it, generally I consume the entire package in one sitting. Was that too much information? My chocolate ice cream of choice is Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream, so I went looking for a recipe that duplicated that as much as possible.

Surprisingly, even though Ben and Jerry have a cookbook published with their ice cream recipes, I could not find a copy in any of my local libraries. Libraries? Hello? Surely I'm not the only person who wants to duplicate the yummy ice cream. Dear my Librarian Friends: You should totally get on that.

Without the official recipe to follow, I turned to the Internet world of copy cat recipes. Low and behold, there IS no copy cat recipe for the Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. What the? Shame on you, Internet. I had to settle for the Chocolate Fudge copy cat recipe and then I just added in some of my own brownies. Well, technically they were Betty Crocker's brownies, but whatever.

Ben and Jerry's Fudge Ice Cream
Ingredients
4 oz unsweetened chocolate
1 cup milk
2 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup heavy cream, or whipping cream
1 tsp vanilla
1 pinch salt

Directions: (my notes and observations are in italics)
1. Melt chocolate in double boiler over hot (not boiling) water. (I don't have a double boiler. I improvised with a glass bowl over a pot and it worked just fine.) 2. Gradually whisk in milk, stir until smooth. Remove from heat; let cool. (When I added the first little bit of milk the chocolate started seizing up and I completely freaked out and wondered if I had ruined the recipe on Step 2. Luckily, I kept stirring and adding more milk and eventually the whole mess smoothed out and came together. So just keep stirring.)3. Whisk eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy, 1-2 minutes. (For all these whisking directions I used a hand mixer. Because I have delicate wrists.)
4. Gradually whisk in sugar, then continue whisking 1 minute longer until completely blended.
5. Add cream, vanilla, and salt; whisk. (Again with the whisking. Aren't you glad you used the hand mixer? I thought so.)
6. Add the chocolate mixture; blend well. (Blend. Whisk. Same thing.)
7. Cover, chill, and freeze according to ice cream maker's directions. (I chilled mine overnight in the refrigerator and put it in the ice cream maker the next morning after I made brownies. Note: brownies for breakfast = yum. Also healthy.)Yield: makes 1 quart.
I reserved some of the ice cream before I added the brownies so that I could review the recipe as it was written. The rest of the ice cream I broke off little bits of the brownie (the gooey middle part, not the top crust or edge part) and dropped it into the ice cream maker. I noticed this made the brownie pieces break up even more, so I also added some larger pieces when I had removed the ice cream from the machine. I just stirred these larger pieces in by hand so there would be obvious brownie. When I make this again, and I WILL make this again, I would do more of the "stir in by hand" pieces because I thought they worked better.

Directly out of the ice cream machine the ice cream was very, very soft. After four hours in the refrigerator it was firmer, but still creamy and easy to scoop. After sitting all day and overnight in the freezer it was much firmer. I liked that it never got so solid that it was difficult to snitch some out with a dinner spoon. There was much snitching.
This recipe was super basic, but the steps are clear and easy to follow. I liked that it didn't require any fancy or expensive ingredients--almost all the ingredients are things I always have in the pantry. Somebody and I LOVED this ice cream. It is not very sweet and very chocolatey. If you eat a cinnamon roll and then eat this ice cream it will taste bitter. Trust me on that one. But in general, assuming you don't regularly eat a cinnamon roll and decadent chocolate ice cream in one night, it is just sweet enough. I think it tastes almost exactly like Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. I might have polished off most of it in one sitting. Maybe. You'll never know.