A Sundae for Summer

This post was meant to go up earlier last week, but disaster struck – we had a freezer malfunction at home and the ice cream I made all melted! Fortunately we were able to salvage most things, but it delayed photo-taking for a couple days. Not that melty ice cream can’t be just as delicious, but ice cream soup was not the imagery I was going for.

This duo of ice creams was inspired by one of my favorite summertime drinks, the Arnold Palmer. It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn what this drink was, and that it was not, as I thought, an alcoholic drink. I think whenever I had iced tea, I almost always thought there were already lemons in there, so I never thought you might need or want to mix it with lemonade, but surprise – I liked it! I imagine it might be partly because I’m the person who dumps a bunch of sugar in her iced tea (and yes, I know what sweet tea is!) so the extra sugar in most lemonades is the draw for me.

I started with a black tea-infused ice cream. I realized a little too late that I probably should have made a tea sorbet instead of a tea ice cream – since I was infusing tea into milk and cream, it’s really more of a milk tea ice cream base. But, if you’re a fan of Asian-style milk tea drinks, you’ll probably find this flavor right up your alley. You can steep the tea longer in the dairy for a stronger flavor, although since it’s black tea you want to avoid steeping too long and getting a bitter flavor. Also, I don’t like how quickly sorbets turn icy in my freezer if I don’t finish them quickly enough, so going with a dairy-based ice cream let me enjoy this longer. (Ironically, this didn’t help me at all when the freezer mishap meant melted ice cream!)

The other ice cream is my favorite recipe for lemon sherbet, just because it’s such a summer essential for me. I could pretty much eat this anytime, but it seems especially appropriate on a blazing hot August weekend when you just want to sit by the pool, or the lake, with a pleasantly thick book. There’s even no cooking involved, but the resulting sherbet is still wonderfully smooth and light, and not grainy at all.

So take the two ice creams and combine them just like iced tea and lemonade, and what do you have?

You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just make one ice cream with both tea and lemon together. The thought did cross my mind: in fact, I might go back and put some lemon juice and lemon zest into the milk tea ice cream as further experimentation. However, my original intention was to make the two ice creams and then swirl them together, the way you’d actually make the drink version. In the end, I was afraid the swirl wouldn’t show up very well in photos (it was a rough few days photography-wise), so I’ve shown the two flavors separately and you can imagine them combining the two of them together with your spoon. They’re quite good individually, as well!