Thursday, February 28, 2008

Pudding is the New Ice Cream

Really, I mean that! This isn't just a snowclone or a marketing concept. It's ice cream; the ice cream I made:
Last week Julie, got a craving for cardamom rice pudding. So she looked at a variety of recipes on line and settled on this one, from the man who Julie used to call my "boyfriend." We didn't have any cream in the house at the time, so I increased the amounts of cow and coconut milk instead. The pudding was delicious, with the sharpness of the cardamom cut against the sweetness of the creamy rice and raisins and the great nutty crunch of the pistachios.
Then I thought, I haven't made ice cream in a little while, and most ice cream uses a custard base, so maybe this stuff would work. Armed with something closer to the correct ingredients (I basically doubled the liquid part, using one cup of rice with two cups milk, one cup coconut milk, one cup cream. 1/2 cup sugar, one full teaspoon ground cardamom, and about 1/2 cup each golden raisins and pistachios) I tried to make my vision a reality. And, what do you know, it worked! Julie still finds the rice in the ice cream confusing and it tends to freeze harder than I'd like it to, necessitating long warm up times for serving. I tried soaking the golden raisins in a little rum, but I think that I should have done that longer and use more. Hmm, future pudding based ice cream strategies to ponder.
The cardamom rice pudding ice cream is served here with a decent but forgettable chocolate hazelnut cake. I think I overburdened the cake by adding twice the amount of hazelnuts (I had some booze soaked one left over from liqueur making) and it ended up too dense and dry. I think I need to work on my bundt cake mojo.

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