Chocolate with Peanut Butter Patties

This long Labor Day weekend presented an opportunity to make some ice cream. I was really craving some chocolate and peanut butter so I settled on timeless chocolate ice cream with some homemade peanut butter patties mixed in.

Rating: 5 scoops

Delectable. No other description needed.

There are many different kinds of chocolate out there - each of which imparts a different flavor boost to the dish. The reason why I like this ice cream is that there are three kinds of chocolate mixed in, including dark, milk, and cocoa powder. It provides multiple dimensions of flavor that only one would not.

Most American chocolate ice creams use just cocoa powder. This contributes a lot of chocolate flavor due to the ground up cocoa solids. The cocoa powder doesn't do much in terms of providing body to the ice cream because of the lack of cocoa butter. Dark chocolate does have cocoa butter (along with some sugar) so that addition helps to create a fudgy flavor.

Milk chocolate adds not only milk, but also more sugar. If you make an ice cream with just milk chocolate without adjusting the sugar ratio, you'll end up with a soft, sweet scoop of ice cream.

Researching the differences in chocolate helped me understand what each one contributes to the ice cream. For this recipe, I used:

• Dark: Central Market 71% Cacao (origin unknown)
• Milk: Lindt Milk Chocolate
• Cocoa Powder: HEB Select Baker's Select Unsweetened Cocoa

While the ice cream would have been delicious by itself, the peanut butter patties I made created an extra layer of flavor. They were very simple with just a mixture of peanut butter and powdered sugar. These were then dipped in bittersweet chocolate and chopped up. I should have refrigerated the patties before dipping in chocolate since they lost their shape in the warmth of the chocolate, but they turned out pretty well otherwise.