A Blast From the Past

Do you remember these?

A few weeks ago, Mister Man and I were having my boss over for dinner (and to watch the latest episode of Glee on television). We had settled on a perfect fall meal made up entirely of comfort food: roast beast a la Mister Man's gramma's secret recipe, with carmelized onions and mased taters. A comfort dinner calls for something yummy for dessert, BUT I didn't have scads of time on my hands. I've come to understand that you DON'T need a lot of time to whip up a batch of ice cream, you just need to divvy the work up over 2 evenings.

So I set about to discover an ice cream flavour that would tantalize the tastebuds of our guest. A round of 20 questions about ice cream revealed that our special guest LOVED the childhood taste of creamsicles: orange and cream all bundled up in one tasty packet of soothing comfort. I thumbed through the pages of my ice cream making bible (The Perfect Scoop by David Levoittz) and to my delight and joy, I found a recipe for Orange Creamsicle ice cream.

AND, even better, it was easy! Look!

Orange Popsicle (Creamsicle) Ice Cream

2/3 cup sugar

grated zest of 3 oranges

1 1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice from 4 or 5 large oranges

1 cup sour cream

1/2 cup half and half

2 teaspoons Grand Marnier or another orange liqueur

In a blender or food processor, pulverize the sugar and orange zest until the zest is very fine. Add the orange juice, sour cream, half and half and Grand Marnier and blend until the sugar is completely dissolved.

Chill the mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator, then freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.

You see what I mean by easy? I mean, seriously, you could make this in the time it would take you to get to the grocery store and back!

Anyway - I had about 3 scoops left over from the dinner, and when Paul was visiting last weekend, he got wind of what was in the freezer. Turns out that my boss is not the only person who has a hankerin' for the tastes of childhood, because when Paul discovered that I had some orange creamsicle ice cream in the fridge, he called dibs right away. And the only thing that was audible as he ate it, was the sound of his spoon clinking against the side of the bowl. I'm pretty sure he licked his lips when he was done. And I'm even MORE sure that if we weren't all sitting in the room with him, he MIGHT have had to lick out the bowl!