Snickerdoodle Scream

I know you think I was screaming in my last blog post, but this title is actually a rip off from www.todaysnest.com who posted a delicious homemade ice cream recipe with, you guessed it, Snickerdoodles in it! But she went one step further and added caramel too! Genius I tell you! We made it for Sunday dinner yesterday (dessert that is, not dinner, even I have some self control when others are around!) and thank goodness we doubled the recipe! It was ice cold heaven in a bowl. I was surprised by how crispy the cookie pieces stayed after being mixed into the ice cream which was an awesome contrast with the creamy cold goodness of the ice cream. And the addition of caramel launched this ice cream right out of the park! Home run, Grand Slam, the fat lady has just sung! Her Snickerdoodle recipe is similar to mine if you were to half my recipe using only butter, no shortening and less flour. That probably accounts for her cookies being extremely thin, but also for them being especially crisp, which is desirable in this recipe. We used her cookie recipe as written but I would definitely recommend using my recipe's ratio of cinnamon to sugar. But then you know I am always going to recommend more cinnamon!

Snickerdoodles

Ingredients

1 cup flour

1 tsp. cream of tartar

1/2 tsp. baking soda

pinch of salt

1/2 cup butter, 1 stick, room temperature

1 egg

Combine dry ingredients, set aside. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg and beat to mix in well. Add dry ingredients 1/3 at a time and mix just until well incorporated.

Refrigerate dough at least one hour. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Roll dough into 1" balls and cover in cinnamon mixture. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Cool completely.

Cinnamon mixture

1/4 cup sugar

4 tsp. cinnamon

Makes 27 cookies

Ice cream

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups whole milk

pinch salt

3/4 cup sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

4 egg yolks

1 tsp. vanilla

2 cups heavy cream

8 thin and crispy Snickerdoodles broken into small pieces

1/3 cup caramel sauce

Place milk, salt and sugar and 1 tsp. vanilla in a medium saucepan over medium low heat.

Bring to a simmer, do not boil.

Beat egg yolks in a small bowl and add about 1/4 cup of the hot milk mixture, stirring constantly so that you don't end up with scrambled eggs. Then add the now warm egg yolk mixture into the rest of the milk mixture stirring constantly. Stir gently but constantly for about 5 minutes over medium low heat until it has slightly thickened and coats the back of a spoon. (Congratulations you now know how to make pudding, also known as custard etc. who knew you were a gourmet cook!?)

Pour your custard into a container and add the cream and additional vanilla stirring to combine. Cover completely with plastic wrap (to avoid that nasty film on the top of the pudding, yuck) and refrigerate at least one hour or overnight. The colder the mixture is, the more quickly your ice cream will set up.

Follow the directions for your ice cream freezer and freeze ice cream until soft serve stage.

Put about 1/3 of your ice cream in a freezer container and layer with half of the caramel sauce and half of the crumbled snickerdoodles. Repeat the layers ending with the last third of the ice cream. Place in freezer in air tight container to harden for a few hours or overnight.

Grab a bowl and a spoon, or just eat it right out of the container, I won't judge!

P.S. This recipe is especially easy if you have Nicole do all of the hard work, such as making the custard etc. Jusy sayin'.)