I really enjoy a good trail mix. Well, I enjoy most things about trail mix. The only thing I’m not wild about: raisins. So, when we decided to make a trail mix ice cream the only condition I had is that we leave those nasty, shriveled things out. Sorry if that offends any raisin fans. We decided to go with a mild almond-honey-brown sugar base and threw in all of the actually good parts of trail mix.
Also, we did something a little crazy. (Being the unadventurous type, it is a little crazy for us anyway.) We altered our base recipe a little bit! We love our base, but were just looking for the ultimate creaminess. Admittedly sometimes our ice cream can get an almost crumbly texture, so we wanted to find a way to ensure that that didn’t happen. After some research, we found that dry milk powder may be able to solve that for us. So, we altered our recipe a bit, added dry milk powder, and oh man. The results were amazing! Definitely one of the creamiest ice creams we have ever made. And that’s saying something! This ice cream is definitely worth making!
Trail Mix
Happy trails with this one!
Ingredients
4 egg yolks
3/4 cup (minus 1 Tbs) brown sugar
1 Tbs honey
1/4 cup dry milk powder
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
2 Tbs (heaping) almond butter
- Mix Ins
Chocolate covered pretzels*
Granola (any flavor you like)
Chopped almonds
Mini M&Ms
Directions
- Whisk the egg yolks until they are light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Slowly whisk in the brown sugar and honey until the color turns lighter and the consistency is smooth, about 2 minutes more. Add the powdered milk and whisk again until well blended.
- Add the egg/sugar mixture to a sauce pan along with the milk and cream. Heat on medium low heat until it reaches 162, stirring frequently and scraping the bottom with a spatula to avoid cooking the eggs.
- Turn the heat on low once it reached temperature and stir constantly, letting the mixture reduce, for about 10 minutes. After reducing, whisk in the almond butter until uniform.
- Add base to a plastic gallon bag, and put in a prepared ice bath until cooled (about 15-20 minutes).
- When ready, make in your ice cream maker based on the maker’s instructions.
- During the last 5-10 minutes in the machine, when the ice cream is about the texture of soft serve, add in your trail mix chunks (make sure they are all about the size of a pea or smaller). Don’t add it all in! Add handfuls at a time until you get your desired chunkiness.
- Move to the freezer until hardened (at least 4 hours).
Notes
- *The pretzels need to be chocolate covered so that they don’t get to soggy. You can buy chocolate pretzels already prepared or you can make your own. I just melted 2 oz of bittersweet chocolate with 1 tsp of avocado oil, broke the pretzels into chunks, stirred them together, and then laid the pretzel pieces out in a single layer onto a cookie sheet. Then, I moved them to the freezer to harden. When it was almost time to add them to the ice cream, I just took them out and chopped them up into smaller pieces with a knife.
