I Scream, You Scream...

My wife and I decided to do something this evening that we haven't done in a long time. We made chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. It's not as difficult as it sounds.

Why would we want to do this, you might ask? The first time we did it we had just returned from a trip to Vermont - the state where Ben & Jerry's was born. We got a taste of chocolate chip cookie dough when we toured the factory. At the time, B&J was the only company making CCCD ice cream and they weren't widely distributed. You couldn't buy the pints at Wal-Mart yet and it wasn't available, in any flavor, in Oklahoma.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, but it could also be cravings. When we returned home, we set to making our own version of the favorite flavor. Here's the recipe:

1/2 gallon chocolate chip ice cream
1 tube chocolate chip cookie dough (standard size, not jumbo)

Place ice cream in a large bowl and allow to soften. You may wish to break it up some with a spoon to allow air into the center portion. Once the softening starts, you can also use the beaters on your hand mixer to push into the ice cream.

When it's still firm but not quite soft enough, you can turn your mixer on low and blend the soft melty parts together with the firm parts to get a relatively even consistency.

Once the ice cream is softened, add 1/3-1/2 of the cookie dough in small chunks and blend together. Once the dough is mixed in fairly well, add more dough and repeat until all of the dough is in the ice cream.

Blend well and transfer to a sealable container. Place mixed ice cream into the freezer, at least overnight, to harden.

What you end up with is a CCCD ice cream that is permeated with the cookie dough flavor, rather than having small chunks of dough randomly implanted into the mix.