Chocolate Peanut Butter

I was craving both chocolate and peanut butter for my next ice cream. I thought about making my chocolate ice cream and adding a peanut butter ripple but then I had the idea of mixing both flavors together in the base. I have had luck swapping out a portion of cream for peanut butter so I decided to do the same with my chocolate ice cream.

And then because I had some time, I decided to get fancy and make some profiteroles and some of my dark chocolate fudge sauce. It was time to get excited!

Rating: 4 scoops

I really like the flavor of this ice cream. It tasted more like a Reese's compared to any other time I've intentionally made a Reese's ice cream (usually peanut butter ice cream with mini Reese's cups and fudge sauce). However, the ice cream was really firm and difficult to scoop and eat after it had been frozen. This became pretty apparent when I was pouring the base into the ice cream maker to churn - it was pretty stiff and required me to scoop it out to transfer it! I haven't figured out why this happened yet - it could be either less cream (so less water as cream and peanut butter have similar amounts of fat) or different amounts sugars since I had to swap out one of the chocolates that I know works for one with a slightly different cacao percentage (supply difficulties, I'm assuming). 4 scoops were given due to the extra arm muscle required to serve.

The ice cream sandwiched between the profiteroles with some whipped cream and chocolate sauce was very good. I wasn't that impressed with the profiteroles though as they and didn't puff up as much as I was hoping they would. As I was doing some research after the fact, I'm fairly certain that I didn't cook the flour long enough. More on this below.

To make the ice cream, I followed my typical chocolate ice cream recipe but I substituted 100 g of cream for 100 g peanut butter. HEB didn't have the specific type of dark chocolate I wanted so I had to swap out for something that had 5% higher cacao. This means the ice cream would have less sugar which could have contributed to the extra stiffness. I'll need to make this again once I see the 85% back in stock to see if this was the reason, or if less water had more of an impact.

While the intention was to use this ice cream in some profiteroles, I also had a scoop a few days later. Delicious by itself too!

To make the profiteroles, you cook flour in melted butter and then beat in some eggs. The important part seems to be cooking the flour - which allows the starches in the flour to continue to absorb moisture (water in the butter in this case). Eventually the starches take on enough water to burst, releasing even more starch into the mixture and causes thickening. The starches become stronger but also more flexible - helping the puff to retain its shape when baking. In the oven, the water in the profiterole turns to steam and pushes against the shell of the profiterole. Because the steam can't escape, the profiterole will continue puffing up supported by the starch structure as long as it is still flexible (eventually the heat cooks the eggs in the mixture, which causes the shell to firm up and stop expanding).

In this case, I didn't cook the flour long enough to get to the point of having bursting all the starches to create structure and flexibility. As a result, the profiteroles puffed up a little bit in the oven but ultimately didn't have enough support, resulting in a flat profiterole. There was a nice airy structure inside though, which told me I did part of it right. Next time, I'll need to make sure to cook the flour longer to provide enough structure and flexibility.

For these photos, I picked the two that had puffed up the most. The rest went in the freezer for later eating.