Sweet Surrender

I’m a purist when it comes to baking. High quality cocoa, pure vanilla extract, and European-style butter all take their place in my shopping cart. So I haven’t had much use for cake mix. Until now.

When I received this Cuisinart automatic ice cream maker for the holidays, I was ecstatic with visions of freshly churned ice cream, sorbet, and frozen yogurt (and even frozen margaritas, as the machine’s fairly extensive recipe insert points out). But for all that unhatched imagination, my boyfriend and I could only think of one thing when it came time to whip up a frozen treat: Coldstone’s Cake Batter ice cream.

After an extensive search of my favorite cooking sites, I came across this lovely concoction on recipezaar.com that makes for a highly believable knockoff. We made it our own by swapping out heavy cream for light cream, and replacing whole milk with two percent (you know, to avoid premature clogging of the arteries), then threw in a bag of frozen mini Reese’s Cups for good measure.

We’ve churned up two batches so far, and both times the ultra-rich confection hasn’t lasted more than three days. Try it for yourself, and let me know what you think.