If At First You Don't Succeed, Chai Chai Again

One of the biggest surprises for us in the kitchen has been how fun and easy it is to make homemade ice cream, especially exotic or creative flavors.  Past creations have included coconut, cinnamon w/ oatmeal cookies, candy cane, pumpkin, lemon ginger, peanut butter, maple...the list goes on.  Recently, while driving home from the airport, it occurred to me that Chai Ice Cream would be a really good flavor.  The wife also has an unnatural fondness for chai tea lattes.  Now, if we were truly courageous, we might try to completely invent a recipe.... uh, no... that, my friend, is what the internet is for.  At least as a starting point, it's always interesting to look at 2-3 versions of a recipe online and get a feel for what sounds good and looks do-able.  So, we used this recipe here and pretty well followed it verbatim.

There's something exciting about using up our supply of esoteric spices

 

Heating up the spices to infuse their flavor in the cream mixture.

Tempering the eggs with the cream

The Sp(Ice) Cream Must Flow!

The final product, along with a tasteful garnish (a chocolate Chex mix cookie that a friend made, but I don't have the recipe).

A lot of food blogging seems to be about taking attractive pictures of the food.  We're still working on that.  The flavor is very similar to a cinnamon ice cream we used to make, except it possibly needed to be a little sweeter and spicier.  The texture was also a wee bit grainy.  But all in all, a good effort. 

The best part about experimenting with ice cream is eating our test subjects!