Now We're Getting Fancy

As I said yesterday, I've been playing around with spruce tips because of this blog: Forager|Chef.  You should really check it out!  Anyhow, today I was able to make the spruce tip ice cream I'd hoped to make.  The instructions are on his blog but, essentially, you make an ice cream base, cool it to room temperature (which took half the morning), blend in the spruce tips and then filter the whole thing to get the little pieces of spruce needle out.  This mixture then goes into the ice cream maker.  I set my ice cream maker to soft-serve and it ran for about 25 minutes.  At that point it was the correct texture and I put it into the freezer to set up some more.

The next thing I did was make a rhubarb crisp, as that is the recommended pairing with the spruce ice cream.  I baked it this afternoon and, after we made dinner, I put it into the warm oven to reheat.  When dessert came around, I scooped the spruce ice cream on top.

It's a complex collection of flavors:  the tart rhubarb, the sweet crisp topping, and the floral-earthy ice cream.  The ice cream is more "spruce-y" than the sauce I made yesterday, but that was OK because the rhubarb crisp was a stronger flavor as well.  The 10 year old was not a fan - although I think more turned off by the rhubarb than anything else.

Now I have a tub of spruce ice cream in the freezer, just waiting to garnish some other tart thing.  Looks like there will be more experimentation in the future!