“Coffee and toffee is my favorite ice cream combination.” That’s all a birthday girl needs to say and POOF. Coffee Toffee Ice Cream.

Yes, another’s birthday is really just an excuse to make ice cream. You caught me.

But look, can you blame me?

It’s a tale/flavor combination as old as time—coffee and toffee. Coffee has a complex flavor profile, and history. What complements a multi-faceted flavor assault of a magnitude to the order of coffee, that extreme nectar, better than the lightening power of cream? What better to highlight the caramel tones of a coffee liquor than a piece of brickly caramel itself, toffee? Coffee itself is such a rich and deep experience (go ahead and commit, it is a profound experience), that it begs to be immortalized in…ice cream.

Yup, this is a food blog (surprise). Instead of painting a picture, or whipping out my carving tools and a casual chunk of marble, I churn some ice cream in moments of inspiration. Which tastes better, a sculpture, or Coffee Toffee Ice Cream?

(Rhetorical question. You know the answer. Now if only there were as many birthdays to celebrate with ice cream as there were moments when I want to make ice cream…)

Recipe on the following page.

Adhering to cliché, some rules are meant to be broken.  After 21 years, that list includes—but is not limited to—curfew, jaywalking, whiteafterlaborday, chocolate and beer for dinner…etc.  But lawmakers and enforcers take heart, some rules are written to last.  The one that comes to mind today, and seems particularly relevant every day of summer is this: Ice Cream, Good.  If delicious in real life, made even more delicious when frozen, churned and enveloped in luscious, velvety frozen ice cream.  Sometimes, being a law-abiding citizen is hard.  Really, quite trying.

Cookie dough, and particularly cinnamony oatmeal cookie dough, is a wonderful thing.  Raw, out of a tube, out of the bowl, pieced off from scooped cookie dough balls waiting patiently on a baking sheet to transform into warm, chewy oatmeal cookies—oatmeal cookie dough is delicious.  And while cookie dough ice cream is a no brainer, been around perhaps as long as sliced bread, oatmeal cookie chunks surrounded by tangy, spiced molasses-based ice cream is something a little off-kilter.  The richness of the molasses perfectly complements the homey qualities of the oatmeal cookie dough, together creating a bowl full of happy, happy ice cream.

Recipe on the following page.

But my favorite is still here.  And here. And here.

Here too.

At the Bay Shore Fire Island Ferry terminal, there is a snack shack.  Now this snack shack, in all it’s white washed, lopsided and permanently grease-perfumed air quaintness has a secret.  That secret comes in either a cup or a bowl, and that secret is loaded with huge chunks of lobster, crab, shrimp and the rest of the sea.  The red Seafood Bisque at the ferry terminal is  perfection in soup form.

Grab a cup, or a bowl or four, and go to the beach.

Oh yeah, Fire Island is also close to that little town, New York City, where donuts and soft serve abound.

Summer is great, don’t even pretend it’s not.  If you happen to be stuck inside, go outside in the sun.  Sunshine is not only fine, it’s fantastic.  Even better perhaps, when a cup of bisque, a donut and even a soft serve cone are procured.

I spent a long time waiting for it to be the ice cream moment.  And by long time, I mean I’ve been waiting since last summer for it to be ice cream weather again.  (Which is not to say that I haven’t been eating ice cream in the interim.  But while ice cream is always good, always as close to perfect as possible, ice cream at 20 degrees under overcast skies and an 80 percent of precipitation is just not the same as ice cream on a sunny day.)  So now, eight months later, it’s time.  Finally, after a long winter, what I’ve been waiting for. Also, an ice cream maker appeared.  Small details.

Taking a hint from an ice creamery in New Orleans, the southern capital of heat, bourbon, shiny things, long days and great ideas, beer cardamom ice cream seemed to be the perfect kick off to ice cream season.  You though ice cream week was excessive?  Just wait.

Say it’s not a good idea.

Go ahead and take a moment to think about it.  Try as hard as you like, scrape the insides of your brain, summon up all known food logic and then propose something which implies that, you know, maybe beer-flavored ice cream is wrong.  A bad idea.

Can’t come up with a reason?  That’s right.  Because there’s nothing to say beer and ice cream together isn’t anything but wonderful.

The rule of ice cream—and there is a rule, let’s be clear—is that ice cream is always delicious, no matter the ingredients.  Now take beer and a little cardamom.  Add a witbier or heffeweizen, inherently a little sweeter with light citrus and cardamom notes, lends itself perfectly to ice cream.  The richness of the cream and the addition of sugar enhances the flavors of the beer to create a light, extremely refreshing scoop of ice cream.  The cardamom runs through the ice cream as a flowery, slightly spicy foil to the deliciously rich yeastyness.

Now, if one were particularly daring, a deviation on a root beer float wouldn’t be out of the question.  Just imagine, beer ice cream beer float.  Say it twice.

Recipe on the following page.

Burger, fries and a shake.

At Top Chef alum Spike Mendelsohn’s Good Stuff Eatery—and neighboring We the Pizza—the food is conceptually simple, and exceptionally executed.  Basics like chili cheese burger, fries and shakes are enhanced and brought up to ridiculously hearty, delicious and yes, junky, levels by the addition of caramelized Vidalia onions, mushrooms and fried eggs.  These improvements attract droves of suited, Capitol Hill workers.  From 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. one can expect a line out the door of pencil stripped, blazer-donning interns and the fully-employed.  But that’s because the fries are not just made to order, but can be tossed with a blend of herbs and sea salt.  And the burgers are encased in buttered buns.  And oh, the shakes.  Riffing on the current administration, Good Stuff offers a Prez Obama Burger and a Michelle counterpart—blue cheese and health-conscious turkey respectively.

But what really is the ultimate win is the handspun shakes.  Forget the Coletti Smokehouse burger—complete with BBQ sauce and bacon—just hand me a milkshake.  With options ranging from Toasted Marshmallow to Dulce de Leche, theses shakes are absolutely divine.  Yes, they’re bad for your health, for your arteries, but when faced with something so delicious, who cares?

I am salivating right now.

Gross, and much to much information, I know.  The image of a body leaking spit ala your favorite canine is never, ever pleasant.  But please, take the time and imagine the most painful addict withdrawal from more a more serious substance—let’s just over exaggerate and go with crack.  Water it down a bit—but by no means a lot—and you’ll be left with the hole in my stomach left by the absence of the Milky Way Malt Milkshake with organic whipped cream.  Pure bliss contained in a caramel and fudge encrusted cup, filled with the best kind of ice cream goodness and topped with a pillow of lush cream and a sprinkle of crushed malt balls.

And oh, the whipped cream.  It’s a perfect dollop of lightly sweetened, real cream.  To be honest, it’s the main reason to order a milkshake.  One time, when both my and my compatriot-in-burger lacked the cream, we had to return because the shake was just not the same.  Really, we had to complain because the whipped cream is really the most delicious part.  Forget the fudge, forget the marshmallows, it’s all about the toppings.

So what does this all mean?

Good Stuff (GS) is a necessary component of life.  Overpriced, but inexplicably contingent to a better way of living.

As a side note, GS is more expensive that one would expect for a burger joint.  But give it a try anyways.  You might just become addicted.

What’s the thing to do when you leave the frigid north and go on holiday break?

Apparently, the thing to do is eat a lot of food, go camping, and embark on a 72 hour picnic.  Ramen, steak, Cuban rice and beans, pastries, and salted caramel hot chocolate, all enjoyed at the ‘best restaurant around.’  The beach.

Hello, California.

Alright, the only thing you need to know about LA and Southern California besides the fact that the beaches are beautiful and literal smooth-pebbled and bleached-sand heaven 360 days out of the year, is that there is an ice creamery on a little street named Heliotrope.  Take a left off Melrose as the Michael Jackson mural and park.  The Prince won’t steer you wrong.

The magic phrase, the key to your happiness, is ‘one scoop, two balls.’ $2.75, two flavors, frees sprinkles.  (But you should really stick with the sparkling sugar.)  Oh yeah, and the place is called Scoops.

With a tiled entryway, red-covered chairs, and a gigantic mobile a la Calendar made of oversized ice cream shovels, Scoops is the northern most storefront of four relatively small and nondescript unique little shops.  But Scoops, oh Scoops.  Talk about ice cream heaven for the purist.  With a rotating daily menu anchored on the house favorite Brown Bread ice cream, Scoops is all about the ice cream, and nothing but.  Example—the ice cream cake?  No cake.  A round of ice cream, shaped like a cake, but just ice cream.

My favorite kind of cake.

A sampling of Scoops flavors, drawn from two days of research: Malt Honey, Chai Black Sesame, Mocha Oreo, Pumpkin Eggnog, Vanilla Malt, Mint, Maple Oreo, the infamous Brown Bread, etc.  Creative flavors, each unique and absolutely delicious.

But the Brown Bread.  Oh, the Brown Bread.  Misleading in that there is no real bread included, but there are Grape-Nuts, the cereal of your future senile days.  A vanilla base studded with candied Grape-Nuts and caramel, Brown Bread ice cream is alternatively salty and sweet and most importantly, crunchy.  After extensive testing over the past twenty years, I’ve concluded that the secret to the perfect ice cream is the contrast between creamy and crunchy.  And, being made of rocks and fiber, Grape-Nuts retain their crunch even in ice cream.

Adhering to the rule that butter and sugar make anything delicious, candied Grape-Nuts are good.  So good in fact, that you might actually consider eating them in milk or over yogurt.  Granted, after canidage they have the nutritional qualities of butter-soaked Fruit Loops.  But they’re good.

Having no true recipe for Brown Bread ice cream, just the inspiration, I took the liberty of swirling the ice cream with caramel and infusing the custard.  Just because.  I won’t say it’s better than the real deal, but this Brown Bread ice cream is definitely in the top three of my all-time favorite ice creams.  The creamy-crunchy, salty-sweet dynamic is hard to beat.

So while you could and should go to LA, you can also bring a little bit of LA home.  In the form of a quart of ice cream, of course.

Recipe on the following page.

Is it obscene?  Well, that really depends on where you stand in the battle of fat.  Are you afraid of a little cream, a little butter?  What about a little sugar then?

In a pervious post I noted that, as a Crack Pie Round Two, I was going to dress the Crack Pie portion of the Chocolate-Malt Cake and Blueberry and Cream Cookies Momofuku Milk Bar Trio in my absolutely favorite treatment.  Make it into Ice Cream.  So, that little amount of butter—you know, ½ a pound isn’t that much—plus a custard base, that’s not obscene, is it?  I’ve discovered that, when it comes to ice cream, my stomach and brain—oh yea, not the reasonable part of my brain, no way that gray matter has anything to do with my decisions today—demolish my arteries.  You’re clogging you say?  Butter will help with that.

Recipe on next page.

Yes, this is what it looks like.

It’s my favorite place on Earth, brought to you through the magic of food and beach porn.

There’s not much to say, so I’ll just show you.  Beautiful bays, and lots of ice cream.  Oh yea, and candy.  Below is Bittersweet Ice Cream from the Ice Castle.

It’s a hard, hard, life.

Blame this resurgence of Ice Cream Week on a taco truck.  A taco truck after 1:00 a.m. in an exceptionally interesting part of Los Angeles that would most definitely be impossible to find again during the day in a normal state of mind.  Parked next to an electrical box in a v-shaped parking lot at the corner of an intersection that boasted many neon signs for cars, different sorts of random items, and a lot of Spanish, the truck was surrounded by various people in different states of being.  Most stood around with plates eating little three inch tacos.

And while I backed down from the tongue—lengua— taco in a cowardly and sober way, I did try a bit of the head taco and the grilled onions, both of which were delicious, greasy, spicy and appreciably salty without being over powering.  The meat was mounted on a vertical spit and the tacos were assembled by a surprisingly large number of people crammed into a standard sized truck.  One would pull the tortilla out of the steamer, another would hold it under the spit and slice of sheets of meat which then fell a foot or two to the tortilla.  The taco then got a sprinkling of herbs and spices, finished off by a pile of grilled onions.  But the last man, the man who hand the dollar tacos out the window, also distributed Styrofoam cups of horchata, which, on a hot LA night, is quite literally perfect.

Having never tried horchata—again a major fail in the adventurous palette department—mostly due to an overwhelming but still highly irrational fear of fruit and even the slightest possibility that horchata may taste like bananas, I was shocked. The first sip was slow, and surprising. Horchata is everything I love, except sucked through the narrow vein of straw for maximum ease.  It’s cool, sweet, refreshing, and slightly spicy.  It’s light.  And while I still have a great dislike of fruit, I’ve been kicking myself ever since for not giving horchata a try sooner.