Christmas-in-July Eggnog Ice Cream

While visiting the Blue Mountains in Australia a few years ago, I was introduced to the concept of Christmas in July. This “holiday” is more of just a marketing ploy (“Book your holiday brunch NOW!”), but it’s kind of neat because southern hemisphere dwellers can experience a northern-style Christmas with decorations, carols, snow, roaring fires, and eggnog. While I love all these things during the winter — and winter sounds pretty good during the oppressive scorch of mid-summer — I can’t seem get into the Christmas spirit in July. However, I have been able to choke down this eggnog ice cream — ya know, in honor of the season (*smirk*).

Click “Continue Reading” for the recipe…

A few things about this recipe:

Ohmygosh it’s good.
It uses raw eggs. (You may want to read my post about raw eggs, here.)
I don’t have an ice cream maker, so I made it the old fashioned way — in the freezer. If you’re doing yours in the freezer too, make it a daytime project. If you begin in the evening like I did, you may find yourself watching late-night infomercials, tryin’ to kill time while your ice cream crystallizes.
You can skip the cream and just use whole milk for this recipe. It just won’t be as creamy.
You can easily double the recipe. The measurements below make ~2-3 servings.

Eggnog Ice Cream

3/4 cup heavy cream

3/4 cup whole milk

2 whole raw eggs

2 tsp vanilla

dash of salt

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 to 1/3 cup honey or maple syrup – (This was the perfect opportunity to use my special raw honey, since the ice cream doesn’t get heated at all.) (Oh, and I used 1/3 cup honey, but wish I had cut it down to 1/4 cup.)

Throw everything into the blender and blend it. I found that the honey mixed in better if I added it in a stream while the blender was running. Take a little drink of it, and add more of something if you need to. Pour into your ice cream maker if you have one.

If, like me, you don’t have one, pour into a large, shallow pan or plastic container. The bigger the pan, the more surface area is exposed, and the faster this project will go.

Put the container into the freezer. Set your timer for about 1 hour. Pull out, stir vigorously with a whisk or handheld immersion blender. Put back into the freezer. Again, set your timer for about an hour. Pull out, stir vigorously, put back in. Continue this process until it’s frozen into the texture of ice cream. Toward the end, you’ll just be stirring it up with a spoon because it’ll be too frozen for the whisk/blender to work anymore.

My ice cream took about 5 hours of stirring it every hour. You could then eat it right away, or put the lid on and store it in the freezer (obviously! :-)).