This is the official recipe for Ample Hills Creamery’s Sweet as Honey ice cream. It’s a sweet cream ice cream base with chunks of homemade honeycomb candy.
My family and I still reminisce about our road trip to Maine from earlier in the summer. We like to talk about all the food we ate (especially the lobster rolls from The Lobster Shack at Two Lights – you guys need to go!). When we ask Addie what her favorite food from our trip was, she will say, without any hesitation that it was our pitstop at Ample Hills Creamery in Brooklyn.
My friend J introduced me to Ample Hills several years ago, when a few of us flew up to Brooklyn to surprise her for a milestone birthday. We walked to Ample Hills one evening after dinner, and I was in ice cream heaven. I’ve been slowly but surely recreating many of their flavors, thanks to the awesome cookbook that I bought.
During this visit to Brooklyn, I tried a flavor that I had not recreated yet and was new to me. It was their Sweet as Honey ice cream, which was a plain cream base with honeycomb chunks. The honeycomb ended up melting into the ice cream for the most part, and what I got to eat was a honey-flavored ice cream. It was oh so good, and I could not stop thinking about it.
When I returned home, I was excited and surprised to see the official recipe in my cookbook. Sadly though, when I made their honeycomb recipe, it did not turn out. I followed the instructions to a tee, yet my honeycomb ended up cooking too much and got dark… and tasted bitter. Sadly, I threw out that batch and made another recipe that was much more successful. That’s what I used here in this recipe.
We loved this ice cream. Although my honeycomb chunks were… uh, very chunky (meaning that I did not do a good job chopping them into smaller pieces), the flavor was all there. The ice cream was smooth and creamy, and the smaller chunks of honeycomb melted into the ice cream. Yes, I had a honey-flavored ice cream on my hands, and it tasted just like the one at the scoop shop in Brooklyn.
Husband’s rating: 4 out of 5
Addie’s rating: 4.5 out of 5
My rating: 5 out of 5
Sweet as Honey (hokey pokey) ice cream
Ingredients
- ¾ cup organic cane sugar
- ½ cup skim milk powder
- 1 and ⅔ cups whole milk
- 1 and ⅔ cups heavy cream
- 3 large egg yolks
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ½ recipe honeycomb candy broken into bite-sized chunks (link to recipe below).
Instructions
- Get a large bowl and fill it with ice. Set aside.
- In a large saucepan, mix together the sugar, milk powder, and milk. Whisk until the milk powder dissolves. Then add the cream and mix well.
- Place the egg yolks in a small bowl and set aside.
- Put a fine mesh sieve on top of a large bowl and set aside.
- Turn the stove to medium and clip a candy thermometer to the side. Stir the mixture until it reaches 110 degrees F (45 degrees C).
- Take the saucepan off the stove (but do not turn it off). Pour about 1/2 cup of the milk mixture into the small bowl with the egg yolks. Keep whisking so the eggs don't scramble. Then pour the egg yolks back into the sauce pan and keep stirring.
- Keep heating the mixture until it reaches 165 degrees F (75 degrees C). This will take about 5-10 minutes.
- Pour the mixture into the fine mesh sieve. Remove the sieve and stir the vanilla into the custard mixture. Mix well.
- Allow the ice cream mixture to cool in the ice bath before transferring to the refrigerator to cool completely, at least another 1-2 hours.
- Once the ice cream mixture has completely cooled, churn in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturer's directions.
- Transfer a few scoops of the ice cream into a freezer-safe container, add chunks of the honeycomb candy and repeat. Freeze for 8-12 hours before serving.