The Churning Bush

So a while ago an amazing friend of mine gave me my first request – snickerdoodle dough ice-cream. While this recipe is fundamentally based on a commercially available ice-cream she likes, which is a plain cashew milk ice-cream with snickerdoodle cookie dough pieces, I decided to refine the idea a little bit and make it my own. Specifically, I added some cinnamon to the ice-cream custard itself it to really drive home the snickerdoodle-osity of the recipe. After all, a snickerdoodle is a biscuit with a cinnamon coating, so why not make the coating the rest of the ice-cream? Naturally, this is optional – you could also try just coating the dough pieces in cinnamon, like an actual snickerdoodle.

The ice-cream part of this recipe is just the more advanced version of my previous three-ingredient ice-cream base, which I developed in the course of refining this recipe. For the cookie dough, however, I performed a couple of experiments. The first thing I did was make some actual snickerdoodles, which aren’t a thing here in Australia! I will say, though – they are tasty! They are quite a soft and fluffy biscuit, all in all, with the flavouring (as mentioned previously) mostly coming from the cinnamon sugar coating.

I wanted to replicate that softness in the dough itself, so after finding that typical cookie dough frozen by itself set a little hard for my liking, I went for a dough with extra milk and made sure to cream the fats and sugars together first.  With this more liquid dough, I got something just a bit harder than the ice cream itself, but not distractingly so.

Naturally, this recipe does use raw flour. I did some mild research into its safety, but I didn’t find much that was conclusive about the efficacy of heat-treating the flour before consumption. I found one press release (https://ag.purdue.edu/stories/home-kitchen-heat-treated-flour-doesnt-protect-against-foodborne-illnesses-purdue-food-scientist-says/) from a US university that stated heating was insufficient to protect against all food-borne illnesses, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t reduce the risk. I certainly found that it didn’t impact the quality of the dough, so I’d put treating the flour into the ‘it won’t hurt and it might help’ basket. If you do decide to give your flour a heat treatment, the typical course is to cook it for 5 minutes in an oven pre-heated to 350°F/180°C.

Vegan Snickerdoodle Dough Ice-Cream

Ingredients

600 millilitres	Water
130 grams	Cashews
Powders
150 grams	Sucrose (White sugar)
50 grams	Dextrose (D-glucose)
5 grams	Stabiliser, such as xanthan gum
3 grams	Cinnamon
Fats
30 grams	Neutral oil
Snickerdoodle Cookie Dough
60 grams	Sucrose (White sugar)
20 grams	Refined coconut oil
5 grams	Neutral oil
A pinch	Nutmeg
A pinch	Salt
60 grams	Flour
20 grams	Plant-based milk/water

Directions

1. Chop the cashews, then soak in 600mls of water overnight.
2. The next morning, blend the cashews and water together until completely smooth – this may take several minutes! It’s done when there is no noticeably lumpy residue on the sides of the container when you pour it.
3. Heat the milk in a double boiler over medium heat. While the milk heats, slowly incorporate the powders and oil, whisking constantly. When the mixture reaches about 80-85°C (175-185°F), remove from the heat and stick blend for about a minute to further emulsify the oil.
4. Place the ice cream mixture in the fridge once cool enough and leave it there until cooled to 4°C (40°F) or overnight. Sometimes I like to move the mixture to the freezer for the last half hour to get it as cool as possible and help with the churning process, but don’t leave it long enough in the freezer that it starts to solidify.
5. While the ice-cream base is cooling, make up your cookie dough. Get the coconut oil to a soft texture, depending on the temperature of your kitchen either by cooling it in the fridge briefly or warming it up in the microwave in bursts at low power. Once soft, cream the coconut oil with the sugar and vegetable oil. Fold in the nutmeg, salt, flour and milk/water until a smooth dough forms, then press into very small balls – maybe pea sized – and refrigerate.
6. Pour the mixture into your churner and leave it running until fully churned. Being ‘fully churned’ is hard to judge without experience, but your ice cream should have increased somewhat in volume and look a bit denser than soft serve. The time needed will vary dramatically depending on your churner, but will typically be between 20 and 40 minutes.
7. Once your ice cream has churned, layer it and the balls of cookie dough in the container you‘re freezing it in, then give everything a brief fold.
8. You can serve your ice cream as soft serve now if you like, or you can put it in the freezer to harden to your desired level. If it’s been in the freezer for more than 12 hours or so, you might need to give the ice cream a bit of time to soften at room temperature before you serve it.