Ice Cream Day at Pastry Class

I.Love.Ice.Cream. I don’t consider it a pastry to be made in pastry school, but since ice cream and I are good friends I was happy to learn how to make some. I worked with Wendy again and a lady named Krista and we chose to make Vanilla Bean ice cream and Eggnog ice cream. The eggnog ice cream was the same as the vanilla bean, but at the end we added rum & nutmeg.

We started by slicing two vanilla beans and scraping out the seeds. Ever wonder what the microscopic black dots are in your vanilla bean ice cream? Those are vanilla seeds and they are oh so tiny. If you get vanilla ice cream without the tiny dots, then it was made with vanilla extract and not the real thing.

We simmered half & half with sugar and the vanilla bean seeds for approximately 10 minutes. It looked like cookies & cream at this point.

Then we mixed in egg yolks and whipped them together. Since the mixture was still hot from simmering, it actually cooked the eggs a little (which is normal). Nobody wants eggs in their ice cream, so we put the concoction through a strainer to get out the scrambled egg bits and soaked it in an ice bath. We ended up with a scrumptious-smelling bowl of pre-ice cream.

We poured our mixture into the ice cream machine to churn for an hour. The machine did all of the work to get it frozen. I don’t have any pictures of my finished product because I gobbled it up as soon as it was put in front of me. I can’t resist. It was so creamy!

My favourite ice cream today was the coffee parfait. I do not like coffee at all. I thought I would be nice and try another group’s creation and I planned on saying I liked it even if I didn’t. By golly I didn’t have to fib. It was amazing. I tasted more of the Kahlua & Heath bars in it than I did espresso powder. It was served with a dollop of whipped cream and shaved chocolate.

Another group made blackberry sorbet & grapefruit & vodka granite. Both were very tasty and would be perfect for a hot summer day.

My group finished somewhat early so we made vanilla tuile paste & chocolate tuile paste. It is pretty much a very thin cookie that is used more for decoration & you can shape it when it comes out of the oven before it cools. We cut out patterns then scraped the paste onto parchment paper and baked it for only about 5 minutes.

As soon as it was out of the oven I had to peel the cookie off the paper and shape it into a bowl or curved shape while it was still hot. We didn’t do anything else with the tuile today, but I could have eaten it with the ice cream.