You might eat dinner after you make this ice cream. Make sure you leave rum for dessert!
It’s summer! Time to bust out the ice cream maker! This ice cream is super fancy compared to the other ice creams/sorbets I’ve made (you can also just blend a melon and put it in the ice cream maker and it’ll be great). To make any ice cream cheese cake ice cream, just toss in some softened and blended cream cheese and a sleeve of graham crackers. That’s pretty exciting.
This recipe has two parts: first you make the cheese cake ice cream base, then add a blueberry sauce. This is IMPORTANT: don’t just put blueberries or blended blueberries in your ice cream without cooking them fully, because then you will have little ice chunks of frozen fruit in your final product. Not great. With almost no tweaking, you could use this exact recipe to make any fruit here cheesecake ice cream: strawberry, raspberry, peach…
If naming conventions were more standard, a shredder would be called a word processor. Also how great would this food processor be with a cartoon wooden spoon giving me tips about how to use it?!
The cheesecake ice cream base is easy: blend cream cheese, half and half, milk, sugar, salt, and rum (yum). I used a food processor for this. You want chunks of cream cheese so don’t worry about mixing it really well. Also, cream cheese is very rich, which is why we’re using half and half here instead of cream. You can use cream if you want. Then toss that in the ice cream maker while you do the rest.
To everything, churn churn churn
There is a season, churn churn churn. That season is summer. Making ice cream in winter is not something I think of doing
To light crush the graham crackers, I stuck my sleeve (unopened) into a bigger bag, and then started smashing it with the end of my French rolling pin. Smashing it with a pot would also work. I liked leaving it in the sleeve to minimize graham cracker crumbs flying everywhere.
I filled out a form about home ownership the other day. Asked if I would’ve bought a house without granite countertops, my first thought: “that would be crushing!”
The blueberry sauce takes a few minutes but is worth it for the fanciness factor. Heat up berries with water and sugar…
Man, I lowthe unripe barrys
And add corn starch, lemon juice and zest, and salt. Stir and stir and heat, and just like cranberries in cranberry sauce, eventually the blueberries will burst their blueberry-y goodness out into a tasty sweet and thick sauce.
Surely they made lots of versions of the robot in 2001: Space Odyssey. Maybe he was even the fifth version: HAL-E. If there were a botanist obsessed with that movie who discovered a new species of single-ovary fleshy fruit, he could name it HAL-E berry. I bet you know whose favorite fruit that’d be.
Sometimes I name inanimate objects and talk to them. If I had used a pan here instead of a pot, I would’ve named him Peter. The brand would’ve been Peter’s creator, so I could call that jammy manufacturer J.M. Berry.
Cool down your berry sauce as much as your patience allows (I threw it in a tupperware and stuck it in the freezer while doing other stuff), then swirl it with the churned cream cheese ice cream and add in the graham cracker pieces.
If workers at my fridge manufacturer took bets on who could mix this ice cream the best, it’d be a sw(h)irl pool
Stick the whole thing into a tupperware into the freezer. It’s so good.
I didn’t take a picture of the final product so here’s a picture of my baby reacting the way I bet you are to this news:
Blueberry cheesecake ice cream, adapted from Joy the Baker:
1 package cream cheese, softened
1 c milk
1 c half and half
1 c brown sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp rum/bourbon/whatever you want
1 sleeve of graham crackers (not crumbs)
at least 1 c blueberries, more if you want
1/4 c sugar
1/4 c water
2 tsp corn starch
1 lemon
First, use a food processor or blender to mix the first six ingredients until mixed (it’s fine/expected that it’ll be lumpy). Throw that in your ice cream maker.
Smash the sleeve of graham crackers into small pieces (bite size or smaller). Chunks are fine here too.
Heat up blueberries with sugar, water, corn starch, and the juice and zest from the lemon over medium heat. Stir occasionally, until berries have burst and sauce is thick (5-10 minutes). Cool the sauce (put into freezer for speediness).
Carefully swirl cooled sauce into churned ice cream, then mix in graham cracker pieces. Freeze for several hours.
