Ice Cream Trifecta!

Mmmm, it was a good time in ice cream world around here over the weekend.  Oh, baby!  Vanilla, cinnamon and a wicked dark chocolate.  Pull up a chair.  Let me tell ya about them...

Wicked dark chocolate, cinnamon and vanilla

Vanilla Ice Cream

Vanilla ice cream was a tough one for me.  I tried a couple of recipes that weren't good.  I think part of it is that those of us who could eat ice cream at one point have a well ingrained memory of what vanilla ice cream should be.  Plus vanilla is a complex but delicate flavor.  Unlike chocolate, where the strong flavor of the chocolate can hide a multitude of "sins", vanilla can be easily overpowered.

I tried hemp milk for the first attempt.  It had a really bitter aftertaste.  Yick.  The second batch had sucanat in it.  Blech.  The taste of the sucunat overpowered the vanilla.  While we like sucunat in quinoa chocolate chip cookies and banana bread, it was too much for the vanilla. The third attempt was better but still had a strong taste from the demara sugar that my younger son didn't like.  (He poured chocolate sauce over the ice cream and ate it anyway.  It didn't slow him down too much.)   But, really, is a stand alone vanilla too much to ask?  

So fourth time's a charm...

Cinnamon Ice Cream

In starting down the road of vegan non-dairy frozen deserts (or "ice cream" for short around here), I asked my kids what type they wanted me to try to make.  Never shy, they hollered:  "Vanilla!", "Chocolate!", "Cinnamon Vanilla!"  Wait... What?  Cinnamon vanilla?  Where did that one come from?  (Hmmm...probably from the cinnamon rolls there were eating at the moment.)

So the second flavor of our trifecta is cinnamon vanilla

Cinnamon (and vanilla in the shadow)

Fantastic!