Ice Cream Sundays - {malted vanilla with peanut brittle}

Malted vanilla ice cream with peanut brittle and milk chocolate pieces was such a yummy ice cream and we had so much fun photoshooting it in our backyard, that I just couldn't wait to share.  The recipe is from the awesome Sweet Cream and Sugar Cones by Kris Hoogerhyde and Anne Walker (excellent photography by Paige Green) - I just love everything about this book, including this recipe, the first one I made from it.

I was a little skeptical to put peanut brittle in my ice cream.  Peanut brittle, which is so delicious, but can sometimes break a tooth, seemed too hard for ice cream.  But, I wanted to give it a try, so I made a double batch (of course) and put peanut brittle in half of it.  I didn't use the book's recipe for the peanut brittle, however, because my store doesn't sell raw peanuts and the authors really emphasized using raw peanuts.  So I used the peanut brittle from the Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream Book, also an excellent book.  I hope to have both of these up on Book Nook soon!  Anyway, I omitted the bacon (!) from that recipe, and it made a very tasty, if not tooth-shattering, batch of peanut brittle.  I was good to go!

For the milk chocolate pieces, I used the stracciatella technique from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz, which is also excellent (are you getting tired of that weekly link to this book?).  The milk chocolate didn't want to cooperate as stracciatella, but I tried to make it work.  So, we ended up with globs rather than a nice thin stream of milk chocolate, but no one complained.

Side by side, the peanut brittle version won, hands down.  It added a wonderful sweetness to the ice cream, and softened quite a bit.  Next time, it'll be a double batch with the peanut brittle in it all.

As for the photo shoot, we headed out to the backyard on a beautiful afternoon earlier this month.  Looking at these shots makes me want to photoshoot and eat malted vanilla ice cream with peanut brittle (definitely) and milk chocolate pieces over and over again!

-Cheryl