Flavour of the Week - Dulce de Leche Ripple

Dear Colleagues,

The latest iced delight to grace the ground floor freezer presents a puzzle.  One taste is enough to render the unsuspecting scooper dizzy, but it this because of the stupefyingly simple genius with which it fuses vanilla ice cream and smooth caramel sauce?  Or simply the precursor to an onrushing diabetic coma?  Why not both?  Enjoy, for as long as you can stay conscious, the golden swirls of lovingly home-made Dulce de Leche (“sweet of milk”).  This traditional Latin American confection, coupled with an already-sucrotic creamy-eggy frozen custard, is just the challenge that our nation’s dentists and insulin specialists have been preparing for. Don’t let them have planned in vain!

Dietary information: this ice cream contains milk, cream, egg yolks, sugar, sweetened condensed milk, vanilla, vodka and salt.

Yours recommending Dulce de Leche as a breakfast spread,

The Stressed Chef

Flavour of the Week: Chocolate Peanut Butternanza

 (The Stressed Chef is on a work trip to Washington DC - he took the picture above! - so this week's ice cream 

is as American-inspired as... well... chocolate peanut butter pie. 
Also, he has told me that thus far, his US ice cream experience has been mediocre compared with his own creations).

Dear Colleagues,

In a tribute to deliciously excessive Americana, this week’s ice cream takes a sumptuous cocoa-loaded cream and splodges a heaping wodge of enchantingly smooth peanut butter into it.  After vigorous and extended stirring of the arm-wrenchingly thick mixture, followed by a turn in the ice cream churn that almost gave the overburdened motor a nervous breakdown, the result is tasty enough to make intelligible speech challenging.  “Mmm” may be the best that you can do, particularly if you’re allergic and undergoing an almost-worthwhile bout of anaphylaxis.  The clearly labelled concoction can be had from the freezer downstairs.

Dietary information: this ice cream contains milk, cream, sugar, salt, cocoa, peanut butter.

Yours in allergen alert,

The Stressed Chef

Flavour of the Week: Raspberry-Vanilla

Dear Colleagues,

Australia’s most pressing political crisis came to an end this morning as Senator the Hon Walter Whippy declared he had the numbers to retain his position as Minister for Ice Cream.  While less-crucial negotiations over the national government continue between the ALP, Coalition and Independents, Senator Whippy said he had cobbled together an agreement to fuse Raspberry First and The Australian Vanilla Party into a unity flavour that promises stability and deliciousness.

The announcement is a disappointment for The Chocolates and the Citizens Coffee Council, whose efforts to form a mocha coalition foundered despite natural affinities amid a bitter dispute over who was tastier.  Sources close to Senator Whippy say that he rejected overtures from The Chocolates early on, fearing association with the Chocolates-dominated Neapolitan government of the 1970s.  The latter still evokes unhappy memories of waffle rationing and unauthorised attempts to borrow whipped cream from shadowy Middle Eastern financiers.

While Senator Whippy declares he will serve out a full term, independent observers expect the unity flavour (already ensconced in the ground floor freezer) to last for no more than a single litre.  Metaphor confusion has left insiders split on whether ambitious plans for sorbet reform are now on the front burner or whether they are to be put on ice.  However, a commitment to transparency is likely to be met, with full ingredient disclosure pledged by all sides.

Dietary information: this ice cream contains milk, cream, sugar, egg yolks, vanilla, vodka, raspberries.

PS some of last week’s unheralded-but-rather-nice cara gelato remains to be eaten too (cara juice and zest, milk, sugar).

Yours negotiatedly,

The Stressed Chef

Flavour of the Week: Shameless Cross-Promotion

Dear Colleagues,

In the grand and glorious history of cross-promotion, few combinations have been simultaneously so brazenly nepotistic and so unarguably merit-driven as this week’s unctuous ice cream flavour.  The astounding conjunction of hitherto-separate product lines that I disinterestedly describe and relentlessly flog is simply this: my basic average everyday hyperpremium handchurned ice cream, infused with a hefty measure of the finest hand-made chai available in Australia today.  This exquisitely robust blend of black tea and copious spices is more than sufficient to turn a surreptitious afternoon scooping into a bracingly fragrant icy-spicy frozen tea party.  And as you’ll find when you take your own sample from the ground floor freezer, in the interests of palatability and non-crunchiness the tea leaves and spices have been graciously strained from the custard prior to churning, at no extra charge!

If you’re intrigued by the sheer deliciousness of the chai but want to experience it as a tea, not a frozen confection, why not visit Joie de Tea, which by an amazing and fortunate coincidence is my wife’s online tea shop?  There you can find her full range of staggeringly tasteful handmade black, green, herbal and rooibos teas, available for purchase and delivery Australia-wide.  This non-partisan, entirely objective suggestion has the advantage of being backed up by a 100% satisfaction rating from tea customers – a claim that I cannot make for my own products, alas, after a disastrous let-us-never-speak-of-it experiment with Camembert ice cream.

Dietary information: this ice cream contains milk, cream, egg yolks, sugar, organic Sri Lankan black tea, organic cinnamon, organic ginger, cardamom pods, allspice, fennel seeds and black pepper.

Yours uxoriously

The Stressed Chef

Flavour of the Week - Christmas (in July) Pudding

Dear Colleagues,

Congratulations are due to all those loyal ice cream citizens who have continued to anticipate and intercept weekly dessert deliveries, as evidenced by their disappearance from the freezer. This remarkable consumption was maintained despite an appallingly extended period of email silence and the resulting lack of a guarantee of the contents or provenance of the frozen shipments beyond their self-evident deliciousness.  Only now can the true tale behind this icy blackout be told to a hopefully-credulous public!

For the truth is that I was rendered incommunicado by the sinister programmatic specificities of the infamous international public-policy supervillain known as ‘The Diabolical Problem’, alias ‘Le Problème Diabolique’, alias ‘El Cambio Climático’, alias (possibly, pending further investigation and an all-clear from copyright lawyers) ‘Keyser Söze’.  Forced to respond with brutally non-Geneva-Conventions-compliant interrogation of the data in a dangerously unstable partnership with Microsoft Office, there was barely time to produce a litre here or there of Blackberry Swirl, Rhubarb Crumble or Übervanilla, and no chance to adequately publicise them.

Fortunately for those who like to confirm the lack of allergens in their dessert prior to anaphylaxis, the chaos and confusion of the explosively onrushing election has allowed me the breathing space to inform you that this week the freezer downstairs contains not-quite-a-litre of Christmas Pudding Icecream.  Swirled with fruit mince soaked in the sticky-raisiny indulgence of Pedro Ximénez sherry, a small spoonful is all you’ll need for your own personal Christmas In July!

Dietary information: this ice cream contains milk, cream, sugar, vanilla, fruit mince, Pedro Ximénez.

Yours moving forward to real action on ice cream,

The Stressed Chef

Flavour of the Week - Blackberry Ripple

My husband, herein to be known (for reasons well-understood by our intimate friends) as The Stressed Chef, is an avid maker of ice cream. (He is also an avid consumer of ice cream, a habit which I consider a most peculiar perversion at this time of year, but to each his own.) Most weeks of the year he churns a batch and takes it into work to share with his colleagues, and time permitting alerts them to the presence of a new frozen delight with an appropriate email. I'll be sharing these with you as they are produced).
 

Dear Colleagues,

In the grisly annals of heinous crime no greater enormity can have been committed than that lately visited upon the unfortunate berries of the infamous Freezer District downstairs.  A discovery by horrified yet oddly peckish police inspectors has shown that the series of disappearances that had roiled the close-knit blackberry community was but the first step of a gruesome design.  The person or persons responsible, of unknown identity but demonstrably diabolical culinary criminality, had evidently plied the missing blackberries with vanilla-laced vodka, rendering them insensible to the merciless pulping that ensued.

The crime came to light with the delivery of an insulated package to the unsuspecting functionaries of the constabulary.  The container inside proved to hold an icecream within whose rich confines were strewn the mortal part of the former blackberries, arranged in a layered display of fruity gore that left transfixed onlookers unable to decide whether to weep or fetch a scoop.  Affixed to the top of the container was a note claiming responsibility for the evidence of “my funny little games” within.  Chillingly written in juice, the note was signed “Jack the Rippler”.

Investigations into the matter continue, though the gradual and inexplicable disappearance of the icecream has led increasingly plump detectives to issue public appeals to the perpetrator for further samples.  In the meantime, unaccompanied berries are subject to a curfew, and members of the public are encouraged to examine the custardy-fruity evidence for themselves while it lasts.

Dietary information: this icecream contains milk, cream, egg yolks, sugar, blackberries, vanilla, vodka, lemon juice.

Yours ripplaciously,

The Stressed Chef