Black Plum, for Miriam

This morning, I churned and froze the Dark Chocolate Ice Cream from last night's fiasco. To be fair, it looked pretty good when I whisked it this morning, and it seemed to churn relatively smoothly, so it might not be a total disaster. We'll see when my Official Taster returns from running errands.

I've just finished the next batch. It's Black Plum Ice Cream, the vote of Miriam (she voted 3 times, which is allowed on the They-Did-It-In-New-York-In-1870-So-Why-Not-Now? rule). It looks great, though it's a shocking pink color. I got the recipe at Sweet Fine Day.

My alteration is that I didn't have any Creme de Cassis, because we don't usually keep berry flavored liqueur in the house. Instead, I used Grand Marnier, and we'll see how it turns out. Unlike last night's recipe, this one is admirably simple. Mr. Sweet Fine Day is a pastry chef, so it makes sense that his recipes aren't full of foolish twaddle.

You:

Cut up a pound of black plums (skins on, weight is before cutting up but black plums have teensy pits so it's almost the same), heat with 1/2 cup of the likker for 10 minutes (med. heat. The idea is to poach them in the likker so they're soft). Turn off the heat, move off the burner, now do this:

Heat 1 cup of heavy cream. Whisk 2 egg yolks with 1/2 cup of sugar until it's lovely (lighter, smooth-ish, etc.), then temper (add hot cream in a stream while whisking so you slowly bring up the temp of the eggs), then mix in the rest of the cream. The recipe does not call for further cooking of the custard, and when I tested it against the back of a spoon I saw that Mr. Sweet Fine Day was right. It was already coating the back (run your finger down the back of the wooden spoon - a nice clear line emerges, eh voila!).

Get out your blender. Put in the plum stuff, put in the cream stuff, blend it well. Cool it in a bowl, then chill it, then churn it in your machine, then freeze it hard.

Currently, we're at the "cool" stage, moving toward the "chill" stage. So we should have plum ice cream tonight.

Next flavors: Honey and Green Tea (not together).

While we're on the subject of ice cream, let me just say that I think I will end up buying David Lebovitz's book (The Perfect Scoop). I've tried about 5 of his recipes so far (all from online sources, including his blog) and they all worked like a charm. And they were easy. And they made sense. So I feel like I owe him $16.47, plus it seems to me that this is proof of his mastery of ice cream/sorbet.