Tangy, sweet and deliciously rich and creamy, this Buttermilk Pancake Ice Cream with Blackberry chips is the ultimate breakfast inspired dessert! If you have an ice cream churner, this will be just as easy as any other ice cream recipe to make.
Breakfast for dessert, or dessert for breakfast. That is the question. As someone who has a slight obsession for both, that’s a dilemma I’m familiar with. Growing up, I did the breakfast for dinner thing for a long time.
Waffles and pancakes only ever appeared on our dinner menu because in the food culture that I grew up in, we routinely ate rice for breakfast. Or to be more accurate, waffles and pancakes were considered “special occasion food” when I was growing up. While breakfast for dinner is fine and all, breakfast for dessert (or dessert for breakfast) is what gets me excited!
I love making ice creams and sorbets. Some of my favourites that I’ve made include vanilla ice cream, chocolate ice cream, mint chocolate chip ice cream, lemon ice cream, salted butterscotch cookie dough ice cream, butterscotch pecan ice cream, strawberry shortcake ice cream, cereal milk ice cream (amazing, I know!), ube ice cream, date and tahini ice cream (another incredible flavour combo), and even basil vanilla ice cream.
Smitten Kitchen introduced me to Buttermilk ice cream and I really liked the sound of it. And I couldn’t agree more with her enthusiastic description of it, because that’s exactly how I felt the first time I made it.
However, of all the different flavoured ice creams I’ve made over the years, my buttermilk pancake ice cream might be the best of all! With buttermilk, maple syrup, a rich and delicious custard and crunchy berries, this is an absolute winner! This truly is a mind-blowing flavour combination!
In my opinion, maple syrup is a requirement with pancakes. Feel free to disagree but I think it’s the perfect pairing of flavours. Not because it’s conventional, but because it works (maybe that’s why it’s conventional? whatever). So as far as I’m concerned maple syrup is a requirement for this ice cream as well. A non-negotiable requirement. It makes the ice cream taste luxurious!
Here’s another dilemma though. Berries or maple syrup? On more than a few occasions, I’ve been to a breakfast joint and couldn’t decide between berries and maple syrup and ended up having both. Yep, I’m that girl who firmly believes in the notion of “Porque no los dos?” No better way to deal with a dilemma! 🙂
What I’m even more excited about though is how I mixed in the berries with the ice cream. They were like crunchy little bits of berry in the ice cream and will be a fantastic surprise of sorts when you’re eating the ice cream. The berry juices will still create a ripple effect, but those little bits of berries you see? They really are like little blackberry chips!
To do this you need fresh berries. Either raspberries or blackberries, and freeze them overnight. (You can get frozen berries too, but you don’t want smashed/damaged frozen berries). So when they are frozen solid, you can crush them so that they break into individual drupelets. (yes! I recently found out what those individual “subdivisions” of these berries are called!). I did this by whizzing them just for a couple of seconds in the food processor, but you can do this by hand too. When these drupelets are mixed in with the churned ice cream, and frozen again, you end up with fruity, crunchy bits of berries with a nice ripple effect too!
Mind. Blown. AGAIN!
A note on using berries other than blackberries – If you use strawberry or blueberry, you can make a compote, or crush them and fold them in with the ice cream. Hard to beat a sweet fruity ripple running through the ice cream. May I make a few more suggestions?
How about chocolate shavings or a chocolate ganache ripple?
Or maybe a fruit compote ripple?
Banana & bacon? (would be my sister’s favourite combination without a doubt!)
And dare I say it… MORE maple syrup?
Or even nothing at all!
Recipe
Buttermilk Pancake Ice Cream with Blackberry chips
US based cup, teaspoon, tablespoon measurements. Weight measurements are recommended for accurate results whenever available.
Common Measurement ConversionsIngredients:
- 360 mL heavy cream 1 ½ cups. 35% fat.
- 6 egg yolks from large eggs
- 180 mL maple syrup ¾ cup
- 1 tbsp vanilla extract
- ¼ tsp sea salt
- 480 mL buttermilk 2 cups
- 6 oz fresh blackberries frozen overnight (or frozen blackberries that are not smashed/damaged)
- 3 tbsp maple syrup
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
Instructions:
- In a saucepan, place egg yolks, maple syrup, vanilla and sea salt. Whisk until you have a smooth mixture.6 egg yolks, 180 mL maple syrup, 1 tbsp vanilla extract, ¼ tsp sea salt
- Add half the heavy cream to the mixture. Whisk until the egg yolk mixture mixes well with the cream. Mix in the rest of the heavy cream.360 mL heavy cream
- Heat the mixture over medium heat while whisking frequently until the mixture heats to 165 – 170°F. If you don’t have a thermometer, then heat the mixture until it steams while whisking. This takes about 10 minutes. It is important to not let the cream come to a boil.
- Strain the custard to remove any lumps. Let it cool down slightly.
- Once the custard is close to room temperature, add the chilled buttermilk mixture and transfer the custard to the fridge to completely chill. You can chill it overnight in the fridge, or a few hours in the freezer.480 mL buttermilk
Making the ice cream
- Take the whole frozen blackberries from the freezer. It should be very easy to separate the frozen blackberries into individual druplets without crushing them. If some get crushed that's ok! The whole druplets is what will give the "fruity crunch" in the ice cream.6 oz fresh blackberries
- Keep the druplets in the freezer until you need them.
- Take the chilled ice cream base from the fridge and churn the ice cream following the ice cream makers directions.
- During the last 10 minutes of the churning process, take the frozen blackberry druplets from the freezer and stir it with the some of the maple syrup and the lemon juice.3 tbsp maple syrup, 2 tbsp lemon juice
- Once the ice cream is at the soft serve consistency or firmer, Add the fruit mix to the ice cream during the last 5 minutes of churning.
- Once the berries have swirled through, transfer the ice cream into an ice cream container and let it set in the freezer for a few hours.
- Serve as is, or with maple syrup, chocolate sauce, Brown Butter Chocolate Fudge Sauce or anything else you like.
Nutrition Information:
“This website provides approximate nutrition information for convenience and as a courtesy only. Nutrition data is gathered primarily from the USDA Food Composition Database, whenever available, or otherwise other online calculators.”
No matter how many times you have this, that first lick/taste/spoonful will always be amazing! The ice cream is insanely creamy with a lovely tang from the buttermilk. It’s perfectly sweet with that maple flavour that’s almost floral and vanillaish. It’s fruity, refreshing, creamy and sweet. This is how dessert for breakfast (or breakfast for dessert) was meant to be!
We enjoyed this with a generous amount of my Brown Butter Butterscotch Chocolate Fudge sauce. That fudge sauce too was inspired by pancake syrups, so how could I possibly not pour it all over my pancake ice cream?
And that’s not all! We did not stop at the fudge sauce.
We even had a chocolate brownie ice cream sandwich! With a big scoop of this ice cream sandwiched between my Double chocolate Bacon and Black Pepper cookies. Yes, I know… it’s evil. So good, it’s evil!
So…
Buttermilk check
Maple syrup check
Bacon check
Chocolate check
That’s everything you need in a perfect breakfast! You know, to start your day off right! Haha! So that folks, is what I call breakfast for dessert! 🙂
This is why my last couple of posts (double chocolate black pepper cookies and chocolate fudge sauce) have led to this. I’m a breakfast person. I really wanted to take all these breakfast flavours that I love and integrate them into a dessert. After all, what’s not to love about breakfast for dessert? (or breakfast for any other meal of the day for that matter).
You can find me on FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM, PINTEREST and GOOGLE-PLUS too. I share pictures of recipes to come on the blog plus other awesome recipes I find out there that I want to try. So I hope you do stop by and say hi! 🙂
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