Butter brickle

Whew! This ice cream seemed doomed from the start, but it turned out all right.

A scoop of butter brickle ice cream, with a bit of toffee as garnish

My friend Sharon had suggested that I make butter brickle ice cream, and I found a recipe that sounded right to her. It's basically an eggless ice cream that features butter, brown sugar, and bits of toffee. With ingredients like that, how could you go wrong?

Well, first off, you could make the toffee yourself, which isn't a foolproof process. And indeed, it went very wrong, with the butterfat separating from the rest of the toffee. Fortunately, enough butter and sugar stayed mixed that part of the resulting mess was toffee.

Something resembling toffee
(or maybe a map of an arid state)

Second, you could make the ice cream using a butter-milk-sugar mix—similar to the butter-sugar mix that's so treacherous in toffee—and have the texture go all rough and chunky. Fortunately, a stick blender restored the mix to a creamy consistency.

After chilling overnight, the top was solid and cracked

Not an appetizing texture

Fortunately, no matter how bad the toffee or mix looked, they tasted great. Sugar and butter just do, unless you burn them.

I could've bought Heath toffee bits instead of making toffee. However, I didn't see them in any local stores, and I didn't order them because making this ice cream was a rather last-minute endeavor. (I needed to think of a gift for my Aunt Lola's birthday party, and when her son told me she enjoyed ice cream with praline/almond/caramel flavors, I figured it was the time to break out the brickle.)

The recipe made more mix than usual, and by the time I added the toffee bits at the end, the ice cream maker was full and straining a bit.

Mixing in bits of toffee

This ice cream is very sweet and melts quickly, but everyone who's tasted it has really liked it. If I make it again, I'll order Heath toffee bits ahead of time. However, I would like to try making toffee again. The ice cream was good, but I love toffee, covered with dark chocolate and studded with almonds. Mmmm...