Fresh Mint Ice Cream (with Salt & Pepper Mini Chocolate Cookies)

Fresh peppermint purchased from the farmers market.

The farmers market has been kicking the past couple weeks, and we like cooking things that are in season.  We will shortly be working our way through the various fruits that the Northeast has to offer (in various forms), but as of a couple weeks ago fruits were still scarce.  The ice cream cake at Allswell inspired us to do a clean, simple, refreshing mint ice cream.  After all, herbs are abundant at the market right now.

Mint Ice Cream between Salt & Pepper Mini Chocolate Cookies. 

When thinking about mint and mint ice cream, we could not help but think of chocolate and how to incorporate that into our ice cream without taking away from the simple beauty of mint ice cream on its own.  Chocolate shavings and mini ice cream sandwiches were our solutions.  The perfect recipe for one bite ice cream sandwiches that I adapted from Dorie Greenspan‘s World Piece Cookies for Salt & Pepper Chocolate Cookies follows.

The Ice Cream Cake

The “Cold Wave” ice cream log

We remember ice cream cakes from growing up in the 1980s. Tom’s family got birthday cakes from Dairy Queen, but Kira and her father got Carvel chocolate ice cream cakes from the Publix freezer on their shared birthday. It has been a long time since either of us enjoyed a proper slice of ice cream cake. Brady got Tom a “Cold Wave” ice cream log from Baskin Robbins for his birthday last year. It’s not really cake shaped, but comes pretty close.

Last week at Allswell in Williamsburg they had a black mint chocolate ice cream cake on the menu. Of course we had to try it.

New Orleans Coffee Ice Cream

Bags of roasted coffee beans at Porto Rico Importing Co, Williamsburg Brooklyn

Our pal, Brady, has long expounded on the virtues of San Francisco ice cream shop, Humphry Slocombe, exclaiming that we have to vacation there just for the ice cream.  Luckily, Mimi told us that they just published a compendium of their recipes, Humphry Slocumbe Ice Cream Book.  They make the French style  ice cream with an egg custard base, something which we haven’t done so far on this blog.  We decided to use one of their recipes as a jumping off point for our own.  

This ice cream tastes great with any classic doughnut.  This marble cruller is from Peter Pan Bakery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The San Francisco based Blue Bottle Coffee opened a Brooklyn outpost in 2010.  While Kira is not a ‘coffee person’, she will indulge in the extremely caffeinated delight that is their New Orleans style Iced Coffee.  Humphry Slocombe collaborated with Blue Bottle to dream up a Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream, which we use loosely as a starting point for our own New Orleans Coffee Ice Cream.