Minty Chocolate

Sometimes we get ice cream flavor inspiration by walking down the ice cream aisle at the store. Some flavor combinations stick out at you, like this Ben & Jerry's ice cream that served as the inspiration for this ice cream: Minter Wonderland. Ben & Jerry's describes this as dark chocolate mint ice cream with both marshmallow and chocolate cookie swirls.

We decided to riff off of this flavor a bit since we liked the idea of chocolate + mint + marshmallow, but wanted to substitute our favorite chocolate truffles for the chocolate cookie swirls. We still get all the chocolate, just in a slightly different form!

Rating: 5 scoops

The combination of chocolate ice cream, mint, marshmallow, and truffles is a keeper! Sometimes when you have so much chocolate, the ice cream can get kind of cloying, but here the cool mint and airy marshmallow fluff help break up the chocolate and give your taste buds something different. While we never tasted the original inspiration for this ice cream, we'd dare to say that this variation is just as good if not better 😄

We started with our standard chocolate ice cream: a mix of dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and cocoa powder which was then added to the dairy and sugar base. The only difference is that we added approximately 10 g of peppermint extract after cooling the base. This small amount made the mint noticeable but not overwhelming to the palate.

If you've been following our ice cream creations for a while, you'll probably recognize these truffles. They're among our favorite add-ins for our ice creams and this one was no exception! Because we make them so often, we've figured out that our #60 cookie scoop is the perfect size for the truffles (before we cut them into quarters) so we can make them much faster now.

These marshmallows are very familiar to us too as we make them for a variety of ice creams. Here though, we wanted to use it as fluff, which meant we had to make the marshmallows at the same time we were churning the base.

Marshmallows are effectively sugar, gelatin, and air. The gelatin is critical in marshmallows since it helps stabilize the mixture and enables air to be trapped in the sugar mixture as it is whipped. Without gelatin, we wouldn't have the fluffy, melt-in-your-mouth marshmallows we all like so much.

When it came time to assemble, we churned the chocolate mint base at the same time as whipping the marshmallows. It was a bit of a guessing game since not every ice cream takes the same amount of time to churn. The temperature, how thick the base is, the volume, and more affects churning time. (The mixer is covered because otherwise the whisk attachment would have thrown tiny bits of syrup all over the kitchen - which is not fun to clean). From there, we layered the freshly churned ice cream, marshmallow fluff, and sprinkled a few chocolate truffles in. A few hours later, we had deliciousness to munch on for a few weeks!