Buttermilk Pancake Ice Cream with Blackberry chips

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. 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 to make.

So, dilemma you say? Pffft. What dilemma!

I love making ice creams and sorbets. Some of my favourites that I’ve made include Vanilla, Chocolate, Caramel, Mango, Tomato (yes tomato!), Peanut butter, Peach, Cookies and cream, Strawberry, Coffee and even Vanilla-Basil ice cream. I love experimenting with flavours and coming up with new ones.

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!

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4.60 from 5 votes

Buttermilk Pancake Ice Cream with Blackberry chips

Author: Dini K.

Print Rate

Ingredients:

• ▢ 13.5 fl oz / 400 ml cream
• ▢ 9 large egg yolks
• ▢ ¾ cup maple syrup
• ▢ 21 fl oz / 625 ml buttermilk
• ▢ 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• ▢ 6 oz fresh blackberries frozen overnight (or frozen blackberries that are not smashed/damaged)
• ▢ 3 tbsp maple syrup
• ▢ 2 tbsp lemon juice

Instructions:

• Combine the cream and maple syrup in a saucepan and heat it on medium heat until the mixture is steaming and just starts to simmer.
• In the meantime, whisk the egg yolks in a bowl until it is pale yellow in colour and foamy.
• Pour roughly ½ to 1 cup of the cream and maple syrup mix in a very thin stream, into the egg yolks, while whisking the egg yolks to warm up the egg yolk mix. Remember to keep whisking, as this will prevent the eggs from curdling.
• Transfer the egg yolks back into the saucepan, stirring/whisking constantly. On low-medium heat, allow the custard to thicken. Stir frequently to prevent the eggs from sticking to the bottom of the pan and curdling. Heat the mix until the custard coats the back of a spoon.
• Strain the custard to remove any lumps and stir in the vanilla and buttermilk.
• Let the custard cool to room temperature, and store in the fridge to chill overnight.
• Churn the ice cream, following the ice cream maker’s directions.
• During the last 10 minutes of the churning process, take the blackberries out of the freezer and crush the berries to separate the “drupelets” (It’s okay if some of the drupelets are crushed) and stir it with the 3 tbsp of maple syrup and 2 tbsp of lemon Juice. Let it stand for a couple of minutes and add this 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.

“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.”

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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 Ice Cream Sandwiches! 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 (Cookies and 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).

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