Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream

Hi there!

It's X here!

A few weekends ago, Ladson and I went biking on the W&OD trail.  Famished afterwards, we had to "feed the beast", beast being Ladson's man-stomach, that eats a lot of meat and such, in quantities unfamiliar to semi-vegetarian X. So, we stopped for lunch at Lazy Sundae, a classic little American deli and ice cream shop.  We had some of the BEST chocolate peanut butter cup ice cream EVER there, and we don't even like chocolate ice cream. Since then, I was determined to make some of my own, with my favorite wedding present, the Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker!

I found this recipe on a blog shared with me by Elizabeth. WOW, Homemade Peanut Butter Cups!!!AHHHH!!! it's too good... but for real!

But this is where I come in. For some reason, recipes just never do it for me. I always want to change something, whether for health reasons, or because I don't have a certain ingredient; the issues were two fold:

1. my food consultant/husband and I decided that peanut butter cups are best in vanilla, not chocolate. So, I based the recipe more on the Cuisinart's.

2. The peanut butter cups in the recipe call for graham cracker crumbs. And who has gluten-free graham crackers??? 

Here's what I did. You can do the same, or be inspired and modify it again to fit your desires!

For the peanut butter cups:

I pretty much followed the recipe from Confections of a Foodie Bride, but instead of the 2 cups of graham cracker crumbs, I used about a 1/2 cup ground flax seeds. This gave great consistency and flavor! I still used powdered sugar (which you can make from normal sugar in a vitamix! so cool!), so they weren't uber healthy, but I think you could use honey or agave nectar if you wanted to, without totally damaging the consistency. Following her instructions more carefully would have made very pretty peanut butter cups, but I didn't care too much. With Trader Joe's semi-sweet chocolate morsels and organic peanut butter...

Ladson and I agreed they were way better than Resees! 

  I had to make more because they were running 

out by the time I got to the ice cream part!

For the ice cream:

Cuisinart's recipes always call for too much sugar.  Additionally, the peanut butter cup recipe made way more peanut butter filling than there was chocolate) or maybe that's just because I ate the chocolate as I went... So instead of mixing peanut butter and sugar as Cuisinart suggests, I just whisked the rest of the filling in the milk/cream mixture to add flavor.  This is my modified ingredient list:

a little bit of the peanut butter mixture
1/2 cup raw honey
1-1/4 cups whole (raw) milk
2 cups (really) heavy (raw) cream
a slug of pure vanilla extract
2 handfuls homemade chocolate peanut butter cup cups (save the pretty ones for eating by themselves)

Whisk together milk, honey, and peanut butter mixture.

Add the cream...

Raw cream is so nice and thick!

I think I could eat this plain because I love raw milk so much! 

I turned on the ice cream maker (be sure to have a frozen container!!) and let the magic begin!! While this was happening, the peanut butter cups came out of the freezer and into the food processor.

But I had to chop them more because they were too frozen hard. I recommend either chopping by hand on a large chopping block, or letting them be a little softer before sticking them in the food processor. Always pulse large things like this!

This stuff was AMAZING!!!!

 I don't really know if I can put into words what a great thing it is to make homemade ice cream. And this one "took the cake". Literally.

What would I do differently?

1. The ice cream got dry and flaky after freezing it.  That didn't stop me from killing the quart in less than a week, but next time I would have used a vanilla ice cream recipe with eggs in it, to keep a better consistency.

2. There were too many peanut butter cups. I know, this seems impossible, but it's true, it was so chunky you could hardly call it ice cream.  I think I would use one cup of chopped peanut butter cups in the future. There is a fine balance there... we will find it someday over the rainbow