Not Quite SMS: Butterscotch Ice Cream

This was another week where I started out with every intention to make the Sweet Melissa Sundays recipe, Melissa’s Butterscotch Pudding, selected by Jennifer of Maple ‘N Cornbread, then changed my mind by the end of the week. You can find the recipe here on Jennifer’s site and stop by the SMS blogroll to see what the rest of the group thought of the pudding. I like butterscotch pudding, but I am currently in cutback mode* and decided that the pudding would be an unnecessary temptation. I think pudding is one of the few desserts that I like better than Josh, probably because you cannot pair it with ice cream, and he eats ice cream every single day. I make a lot of the ice cream he eats, too, but I can’t always keep up. Anyway, because of the SMS selection, I was finally inspired to try making Butterscotch Ice Cream, which I had printed out the recipe for from Smitten Kitchen in May 2009.



The recipe for the Butterscotch Ice Cream can be found here. There is an optional two teaspoons of bourbon in the recipe, which I did not use because I did not like the flavor of actual alcohol when I made butterscotch pudding for Tuesdays With Dorie. The instructions, per usual, on Smitten Kitchen are very clear, though there were a couple things when making the butterscotch that went a little differently for me. The recipe says to “…stir the brown sugar and butter over medium heat until butter is melted, sugar is dissolved, and mixture is bubbly, 3 to 4 minutes.” My sauce took much longer, I didn’t time it, but it must have been somewhere in the range of 12 minutes. It also says to whisk the butterscotch mixture until smooth, and though I exhaustively whisked, I still had some little sugar chunks. I decided to not spend my morning obsessing over the chunks, which magically disappeared when the butterscotch was combined with the warm ice cream custard.



The ice cream was well worth the slight anxiety it caused, it really is a spectacular ice cream. I have made brown sugar ice cream several times and love it, and this is like that amped up. Josh ate some with cookies last night, but it really stands on its own as a dessert. The ice cream rated a 9 for Deliciousness and a 3.5 for Effort, giving it an EDR of 2.57.

*Cutback mode occurs when I have done something silly such as weigh myself or eat too much Chinese food, or in this case, a combination of both, and try to eliminate some, not all, treats and eat more healthfully. Some of these healthy changes inevitably affect Josh’s meals (though I try to not let them too much), which he is not always happy about, and this time prompted him to suggest we start training for a marathon, so I wouldn’t have to worry as much about my calorie-consumption. We must have both been on a runner’s high from the ten miles (in beautiful weather) we’d just run ‘cos I agreed to do it. We haven’t decided which marathon it will be, but it will definitely be on the West Coast and in either May or June. The idea of running 26 miles in just a few months is slightly daunting, but in my opinion doable, as we have kept our weekly mileage between 28 and 30 miles a week since our last half-marathon in July and the weather is just going to get nicer. And now that I’ve blogged about it, there is the accountability factor.