If you love chocolate, cherries, and ice cream, you are in luck today. If you love skinny jeans and have problems with will power… I’m sorry. But look! I made you ice cream!
Our second recipe to celebrate National Ice Cream month is a dark chocolate ice cream, swirled with fudge ripple and chopped roasted cherries. I had intended to make the ice cream as a sundae, drizzling leftover fudge ripple over top and adding a cherry but the look in my husband’s eyes said, “Please don’t.”
Or maybe it said, “Do it and I’ll have you committed.” The two looks, they’re very similar.
I stopped looking for a chocolate ice cream recipe the day I stumbled across this one in The Perfect Scoop. It’s everything a chocolate ice cream should be: rich, dark, and insanely chocolatey (I even add an extra tablespoon of cocoa powder).
Making this ice cream involves making the ice cream and chilling it for a couple of hours in the fridge; roasting the cherries, chopping them, and then chilling them in the fridge; making the fudge ripple and then chilling it in the fridge. But you only have to make the fudge ripple once all summer. It keeps forever in the fridge.
Chocolate Cherry Ice Cream
A decadent dark chocolate ice cream swirled with chunks of roasted cherries and fudge ripple.
Ingredients
- For the ice cream
- 2 cups heavy cream, divided
- 4 Tbsp Dutch-process cocoa powder
- 5 oz good semisweet chocolate, chopped
- 1 cup whole milk
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 5 large egg yolks
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- For the roasted cherries:
- 1/2 lb cherries, pitted and halved
- 1 Tbsp sugar
- For the fudge ripple:
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/3 cup light corn syrup
- 1/2 cup water
- 6 Tbsp Dutch-process cocoa powder
- 1/2 tsp vanilla
Instructions
- Warm 1 cup cream with the cocoa powder and whisk thoroughly.
- Bring to a boil and then simmer for 30 seconds, whisking constantly.
- Remove from heat, add the chocolate, and stir until smooth. Then stir in the remaining cream.
- Pour the mixture into a large bowl, scraping the saucepan as thoroughly as possible.
- Set a mesh strainer over the bowl.
- Warm the milk, sugar, and salt in the saucepan.
- In a separate medium bowl, whisk the yolks together.
- Slowly whisk the warm milk into the egg yolks and then pour the yolk mixture back into the saucepan.
- Stir the mixture constantly over medium heat , scraping the bottom, until the mixture thickens and coats the back of your spoon.
- Pour the custard through the strainer and stir it into the chocolate mixture until smooth.
- Add the vanilla.
- Set the bowl in an ice bath (put several cups of ice into the sink and fill with a few inches of water).
- Stir every 15 minutes until cool and then chill mixture thoroughly in the fridge (~2 hours).
- While the ice cream is chilling, roast the cherries and make the fudge ripple.
- Preheat the oven to 425.
- Toss cherries with sugar and place in a small baking dish.
- Bake for 20-25 minutes and let cool slightly before transferring to a small food processor or blender and pulsing to chop the cherries into small pieces.
- Transfer the cherries to a covered bowl and refrigerate thoroughly.
- To make the fudge ripple, stir together the water, sugar, corn syrup and cocoa over medium heat until bubbles begin to form around the edges.
- Let boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly, and then remove from heat.
- Stir in vanilla.
- Let cool and then store in a jar in the fridge (will keep for several weeks). The fudge ripple must be completely chilled to use.
- Pour the chocolate custard into your ice cream maker and freeze according to manufacturer directions.
- Transfer 1/3 of the ice cream into the storage container.
- Drizzle 2 Tbsp of fudge ripple and half of the cherries over top.
- Repeat, with the next 1/3 of the ice cream, 2 Tbsp fudge ripple and remaining cherries.
- Transfer the last of the ice cream to the bowl, drag a spoon or a knife held upright through the bowl in a figure 8 pattern to lightly swirl.
- Cover with a lid, and freeze completely.
Notes
Yields: Chocolate ice cream and fudge ripple from The Perfect Scoop
Estimated time: 4 hours