Maple Syrup and Rum Ice Cream

In celebration of Cheryl’s 30th birthday, I hauled my trusty half-gallon White Mountain freezer down to Brighton on the overnight MegaBus (10 hours of sheer pain!). Despite my sore back and neck, we were determined to make the effort worthwhile and decided to crank a simple batch of Maple Syrup Ice Cream. Cheryl’s friend had the great suggestion to add Morgan’s Spiced Rum to the mix, and we were off!

My rule of thumb for adding spirits to ice cream is to not use more than 2-3 tablespoons in a half-gallon batch. Any more than that and the ice cream simply won’t freeze, due to alcohol’s depression of the freezing point. But to get a bit more rum flavour, we simmered about half a cup of rum for a few minutes to let most of the alcohol evaporate.

With Maple Syrup, I had a 330g bottle and worked out that the syrup is approximately 2/3 sugar. I added the extra 15g of sugar to reach the total 225g of sugar required by our classic recipe.

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Maple Syrup & Rum Ice Cream

Course Dessert

Cuisine Ice Cream

Prep Time 20 minutes

Crank Time 15 minutes

Total Time 35 minutes

Servings 2 quarts

Ingredients

• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 330 g Maple Syrup
• 15 g sugar
• 2 cups double cream
• 2 tbsp rum
• 1/2 cup rum (to be boiled)
• 500 ml whole milk (approx.)

Instructions

1. Put half a cup of rum in a saucepan and heat on medium heat util boiling. Let it simmer for a couple minutes to boil off some of the alcohol an concentrate the rum flavours. Leave it to chill.

2. Whisk together the egg, egg yolk, sugar and maple syrup until well mixed.

3. Whisk in the double cream.

4. Whisk in the rum and the chilled concentrated rum.

5. Whisk in enough milk to reach the target volume (about half a litre of milk)

6. Transfer to the freezer and crank!

We simply whisked together the ingredients and started cranking. Twenty minutes later we had a soft and smooth ice cream. The guests seemed delighted and were even calculating how to avoid sharing the ice cream with latecomers.

The flavours were noticeable, but subtle. Maple Syrup tends to be subtle in ice cream and I think it works better with darker grade syrup that I find hard to get a hold of outside of Canada. The rum was quite subtle as well, so if we were to do this again I would increase the volume of rum (but still evaporate some of the alcohol!).