Salted caramel meets cookies and cream. For those times when you simply can’t decide (which is me, like, every day). No, really, though. I feel like I’m getting worse about making decisions the older I get (am I getting pickier? I must be). For example, 10 years ago we pretty much decided to move across the country on a whim after Taylor heard a really good country song at the gym. It was barely even a decision. Now? I’ll spend two weeks deciding on a new duvet cover. It’s bad, you guys. I hate this about myself but I’m not quite sure what to do about it. For now, however, I’ll put my pending-decisions aside and dig into this ice cream. Because to ice cream or not to ice cream is not a question that warrants a decision.
I debated whether I wanted a caramel ice cream with cookies, or a vanilla ice cream with caramel swirls and cookies. Ultimately, I decided (once again, my decision-making disability does not apply in cases that involve ice cream, apparently) to do both: caramel ice cream with caramel swirls AND cookies.
You start by making a homemade salted caramel sauce, lots of it. Set some of this aside (for swirling/drizzling/devouring later) and the rest gets thinned with milk and tempered with eggs, transforming into the base of the ice cream. That alone would make for an awesome salty caramel ice cream, but I went one step further and mixed in crushed up chocolate sandwich cookies too. Ok, two steps, if you count the extra caramel swirl. Because why not?
I feel like this ice cream was a different texture, despite the added egg yolks, and I couldn’t tell if that was just the nature of the caramel base, or if my sugar crystallized in the process of making the caramel, or if my freezer just wasn’t quite cold enough to really get the ice cream maker as cold as it needed to be. I wouldn’t call it icy necessarily, but it definitely had a ‘grain’ to it, though it wasn’t at all unpleasant (as noted by the fact that it disappeared in a matter of days).
Maybe, from now on, when I’m faced with tough decisions in the future (or even trivial ones, because, let’s be honest, they are the worst), I simply need to scoop myself a nice big bowl of this ice cream and make a decision before the last bite is gone. It’ll be my own personal decision-making aid. In the form of ice cream, of course. Total Time: 24 hours
