Chocolate truffle ice cream

OK, I admit it. Dave's out of town and I'm trying to keep my mood up with treats. I might have outdone myself this time though. Maybe it was the chocolate truffle class a few weeks ago, maybe it is hormonal, but I needed me some chocolate this week.

This is like any custard-style ice cream, except you also mix in ganache to make it an official truffle. Here are the steps:

Beat eggs and sugar; set aside. Heat milk to almost boiling, then mix in cocoa powder and bring to an almost-boil again. Pour chocolate milk into egg-sugar mixture, beat, then pour back into the pot and whisk over medium heat until the custard becomes thick. Do not boil! I have talked about what happens when you boil it. You do not want this to happen. Pour through a sieve into a bowl and set aside while you make the ganache.

Use a new pan (or clean out the dirty pan and re-use) and heat cream until almost boiling. Pour over broken-up bittersweet chocolate pieces and stir until smooth. This was a much more runny ganache than you would make for real truffles, or even for the ganache sauce I put on my Slap Yo' Momma Cake. (Apparently I haven't blogged about the Slap cake. I have to remedy this.)

One note, bittersweet chocolate is kind of hard to find. But I found some Ghirardelli at Dominicks.

Here are the two chocolate mixtures:

They look the same, don't they? The one at left is the cream ganache, the one at right is the egg and milk mixture. You mix them together with vanilla extract and you're done. It looked really velvety and nice.

I was disappointed last night because I remembered that I have to chill the custard before making the ice cream. Damnit. So I poured the ambrosia-like substance into a container and put into the fridge, only to make it tonight. But some law friends came over to share it with me, so it worked out.

It churned up very nicely - I am always afraid it's going to be soupy, because I can never predict which recipes will churn up nicely and which ones won't. But this is what you want to see when you look into your ice cream maker:

Mmm. And this is what came out:


Actually solid enough to use my ice cream scoop - hooray! There were little flecks of unmelted chocolate in the ice cream, which I don't think I was supposed to have, but it was pretty tasty anyway. A very nice, rich chocolate ice cream.

Emboldened, I spent the rest of the evening going through the ice cream book, checking off ones I've done and marking the ones I want to do - NEED to do - very soon. Especially the fruit sorbets: it's going to be a great summer!