Next up in my celebrity ice cream journey, is Mariana Klaveno, most well known for her role of Lorena on the hit series True Blood. I am totally obsessed with True Blood—I was when it was running, and I still am to this day. So...be prepared for a slew of True Blood cast members.
Mariana decided that her dream flavor would revolve around a cocktail. I haven't made a lot of ice creams that involve liquor, so I was intrigued. Luckily, we have one thing in common, our favorite cocktail is an Old Fashioned!
Liquor can sometimes be problematic in ice cream, because the alcohol content can affect how solid the ice cream freezes. It's almost like working with sugar or honey in regards to ice cream or sorbet, too much of it and your product won't freeze and will be too soft to scoop. I knew that I wanted to have a strong bourbon flavor, but I also knew that I would have to add a lot if I wanted to get the bold flavor I was looking for. Adding a huge amount of bourbon meant that my ice cream would be too soft, so I had to think of a way to get what I wanted. Instead of just treating the bourbon like vanilla extract, and adding it into the finished base at the end, I doused the granulated sugar with a high-quality bourbon (I used Four Roses Single Barrel), just enough to fully saturate it but not enough to start dissolving it, spread it sugar out on a sheet pan and dried it out in the oven, set to 200 degrees F, for about 20 minutes. When I took it out of the oven, the alcohol had fully evaporated and left the bourbon flavor behind. Boom! Bourbon Sugar. I broke up any large clumps and used that as the sugar content in my ice cream. I zested an orange and let that infuse into my base while cooking and to round out the cocktail flavor, I added a few dashes of Bitter Truth Bitters to really bring it all together.
Now that the base was complete, I had to think about the other elements of the ice cream. I made a salty, dark butterscotch with notes of lemon, orange, bourbon and bitters, and used the leftover orange peel to make a quick batch of candied orange peel.