Mango Cardamom-Caramelized White Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough Ice Cream (and a Giveaway)

Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream is one of my favorite flavors, but I realized the other day that it's always the same - vanilla ice cream with chocolate chip cookie dough.  A little boring, huh.

I, along with a handful of bloggers, was recently asked to create a recipe using the egg-free cookie dough recipe from The Cookie Dough Lover's Cookbook (and was also sent a free copy of the book), and I immediately thought of revamping this classic ice cream flavor using some of my favorite flavors.

Rhubarb Frozen Yogurt

In case you didn’t notice, we’ve got a lot of rhubarb at home.  When I buy it at the market, I only get ½ lb or at most 1 lb, but we got a full 2 lbs as part of our share. And because I had a feeling there would be more on its way this week (I'll find out tonight), I wanted to use it up quickly so that it wouldn’t go bad before I could get to the next batch.

I had already made a classic rhubarb-strawberry crostata (albeit with a twist) so I wanted to do something different for its second iteration. A crumble was too similar to the crostata (the rhubarb gets mixed with sugar and baked in both) and sorbet was too boring. So ice cream it was. But, because of the warm weather, I’m a little more conscious of what I’m eating, and a quart of ice cream in a 2-person household was deemed a bad idea. (And yes I will be going to Shake Shack this Thursday for the coffee and donuts custard, thank you very much.)

The Brooklyn Chocolate Experiment: I Won!!!!!

Well, all my hard work paid off - I won 1st prize from both the judges and the audience at the Brooklyn Chocolate Experiment!  My winning entry was a Thai Chili-Lime Dark Chocolate Ice Cream Cone: 70% dark chocolate coconut milk ice cream infused with Kaffir lime leaves and Thai bird chilies served in a hand-rolled cocoa-ginger-Thai basil tuile cone and topped with crushed coconut milk peanuts.

photo credit: Always Hungry NY 

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

I’ve wanted to buy an ice cream maker for almost a year now, and I finally bought one last Friday for the low price of $20! (Thanks to David Lebovitz for the tip about the sale at Amazon – apparently they sold out of them really quickly, so I’m glad I was able to get my hands on one.)

One of my favorite flavors of ice cream is (and always has been) mint chip, but these days I just can’t eat it if it’s green and the mint flavor is distinctly artificial. All-natural mint ice cream (made with real mint) is the way to go, and it’s even better with chunks of good quality chocolate in it.