The next flavor we went for was chai. I love the spicy tea and have made some converts among my family. We bought what we thought was some nice chai from the store and tried brewing it in milk (since we didn't want to water down the ice cream and don't know how to make "chai extract" from chai). The result was very underwhelming. We could sort of taste some chai-adjacent flavors but the milk was overpowering. I was not sure if milk is just bad for brewing or the tea itself is weak. We made a regular cup of tea with another tea bag and discovered it was the bag more than the milk that left the flavor gap. I remembered that Trader Joe's sells a chai powder, so I bought some of that hoping for some better results.
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| Two contenders |
The cup of tea made with water and powder was a lot more satisfying as chai, so we decided to go with that. We heated up eight ounces of whole milk and whisked in six scoops from the Trader Joe's chai mix (the equivalent of three servings). The typical cup only gets two scoops but we expected the two cups of heavy cream to make up the difference. After a brisk whisking, the milk looked very chai.
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| Just milk and powder |
I followed the rest of the basic vanilla recipe but left out the three-quarter cup sugar since the chai powder had plenty of sugar in it already. I did add two teaspoons of vanilla just on the principle that every dessert worth eating has vanilla in it. I mixed the vanilla and cream in with the chai milk after it had been refrigerated for twenty minutes or so.
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| All together now |
Then the mix went into the machine for the regular twenty-five to thirty minutes. It came out quite nice, with a good chai flavor. Now if we could only come up with a good name for it...
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| Chaice cream? |
I went back to the idea of Whoppers ice cream from Part II, this time using the chocolate base and malted milk powder instead of the candy. I used the regular set of ingredients, with the premium chocolate bars from last time and the typical malted milk powder you find in a store.
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| And milk, cream, sugar, vanilla, etc. |
Using the blender to mix the chocolate bars and the sugar became trickier because I added the malted milk powder at this stage. The two chocolate bars, half a cup of granulated sugar, and three-quarters cup of malted milk filled the bottom of the blender quite full. The only problem was the blender's blades would not spin. Guessing stuff was packed in too tightly, I held the lid firmly and upended the blender, shaking it more vigorously as I gained more courage (or maybe desperation) to get the blades unstuck. Eventually it worked and the dry ingredients were blended together.
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| Doesn't look jammed...but it is |
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| Success! |
Next, I added the hot whole milk to make a thick chocolate milk base. Letting that cool down a bit, I added in the heavy cream and a teaspoon of vanilla. Mixing that by hand, I had the mixture that would go into the machine. I put it in the refrigerator for an hour and a half (we had lunch in the meantime). Then the process was the usual twenty-five to thirty minutes to ice creamy goodness.
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| Finished product |
This flavor turned out very well, another top flavor that will get made again.
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