Category: Chocolate

Choc chip cookie dough ice cream

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a spoonful of ice cream from a tin

The day David Lynch died, I started writing down my dreams again. Lately I’ve been dreaming of shiny ornaments and dead relatives and antique treasures and bodies of water, which are all the same thing, really. I’ve sporadically recorded my dreams since around 1996 and feel pulled to value them in this way once more. Though recipes sometimes appear to me as I sleep, with varying degrees of feasibility — I remain suspicious about the steak with Baileys that I dreamed about in 2003 — this ice cream inspiration came to me in the threshold of reality, that is, I heard the words “cookie dough ice cream” and wanted to better, or at least meet head-on, the foodstuff from whence those words were uttered. Making something so stridently yet winsomely Americana feels of a piece with processing the world without David Lynch, but to be clear, this is certainly not a celebration of America — can you imagine? — or even specifically of David Lynch, especially when I’ve previously written about the more pertinent cherry pie and my recipe for Twin Peaks Ice Cream. Writing this at 1am certainly adds to the dreamlike quality of today, tonight, or tomorrow, whatever you might call this time — vivid but not quite lucid for writer or reader, I suspect. Fear not, however, narratively speaking — though hungryandfrozen.com is frequently a liminal space, this is simply a sensational recipe for ice cream.

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The 14th Annual Hungryandfrozen edible gift guide with 87 recipes for you

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A jar with a ribbon around it surrounded by baubles.


Despite last Christmas only having occured 27 minutes ago, it’s suddenly next Christmas – so without further existential crises let’s launch into the all-singing, all-dancing 2024 edition of a favourite tradition for the past 14 years of my 17-year-old blog, something we can all count on, or at least, that we can all count: The 14th Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Guide! With 87 recipes rounded up for you!

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mint choc-chip ice cream

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a blue ice cream scoop and a spoon resting on a tin of mint choc chip ice cream

I am quite happy to admit when I am incorrect, not least because I have so few opportunities to do so — culinarily, at least! Outside the kitchen it’s a nonstop onslaught of realising and abegnation — but today I contritely retract my claim that mint chocolate tastes like toothpaste has fallen into my dessert. Now, supermarket mint choc-chip ice cream is still vile, with its dusty pellets of solidified cocoa-tinted vegetable oil surrounded by puffy, indiscriminately sweet frozen dairy. But when a beautiful woman tells me it’s her favourite flavour, what am I to do but promptly make several batches of it? And it turns out that my mint choc-chip ice cream isn’t just relatively more delicious than the supermarket stuff, or even than my dim expectations, it is in fact singularly sensational. Indeed, it makes my churlish toothpaste claim feel akin to those people who look at modern abstract art and say “my toddler could do that”.

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Pistachio coffee salted caramel slice

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Three pieces of caramel slice arranged on a blue plate
It’s important to record how and what we eat, as a criterion of social history, reflecting us back at ourselves mouthful by mouthful. For example, when I first wrote about this salted caramel slice thirteen years ago in 2011, I said:

“There are many things in life to be afraid of. But, being a person who tends rapidly towards non-endearingly sweaty anxiety I can say this with confidence: adding salt to your caramel slice — or your caramel anything — should not be on that list of things you fear.”

Which is, in the fullness of hindsight, kind of hilarious. Salted caramel is so utterly normal now to the point of prosaic that it’s easily the default and I’m surprised when the word ‘caramel’ appears without its salted qualifier. It’s like walking in on someone in a state of half-dress — where’s its pants?

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Quadruple Crunch Bars

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Come the hour, come the time where one is compelled to shun righteous and elegant cookies and instead embrace slatternish recipes that involve several fully formed foods in their ingredients list. This happens roughly once every ten days, truth be told, and in this case, I acted upon this tawdry urge. Kind of: halfway through unwrapping individual Werthers Originals and slicing their squat, crystallised bodies into golden shards, I lost all energy to complete the cookie-rolling and waiting part of the transaction and certainly didn’t want to wish it upon anyone else; as such, what began as cookies became these Quadruple Crunch Bars instead; you still have to slice up lollies but it’s oddly satisfying, for what it’s worth.

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No-bake Chocolate Ganache Tart

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A base of butter-coated crumbs clinging to each other, a simple ganache filling, a little stove-top action, but the dial of the main oven remains untwisted; that, to me, is perfection. In this content-saturated world that semiotically re-introduces its creators in an endless loop (I never know if I’ve used the word semiotic correctly but I figure if I keep using it, I’ll have to be correct eventually), I grow weary of the need for faux-deep wraparound justifications for each recipe, all of which eventually sound the same — you know, here’s the thing: it’s time we talk about tubers; here’s part one in my series called, it just me or is no one celebrating the cephalopod; call me crazy but I’ve had it up to here with [x ingredient that they have previously shared nineteen recipes of] and it’s time to admit that [y ingredient which has one molecule’s difference from x ingredient] is superior. But without wanting to accept self-awareness as a means to an end; I’ve got to hand it to the dull-to-me food creators in this one regard: when I consider this no-bake chocolate ganache tart, I genuinely do feel like saying bland platitudes about how it’s superior to all other chocolate goods, indicating that I’m the first person to ever feel this way. Ever taste a chocolate tart so good it makes you boring?

I’d shudder, if it weren’t so distractingly delicious.

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white chocolate-dipped joe frogger cookies

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I have all the time in the world for a droll, old-timey recipe title, the more obtuse and obscured in layers of misheard words and regional vernacular the better. Fortunately, as well as having the kind of eye-catching name that caught my eye and made me want to bake them instantaneously, these Joe Froggers are also strikingly delicious.

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chocolate fudge ripple ice cream

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For someone who harps on about not only how much they love ice cream but who also takes such noisy pride in circumventing Big Ice Cream Machine with my no-churn recipes, it had been a shameful and inexcusable year and two weeks between the café brûlot ice cream I posted about in January, and the last ice cream recipe prior. To rescue this claim from the realm of prevarication and braggadocio and worse, mere adventitiousness, I’ve endeavoured to make more ice cream. Maybe next time I can rescue myself from my inability to say a single normal sentence! But also, maybe not.

Now, where the café brûlot ice cream was grown up and worldly, this chocolate fudge ripple ice cream is significantly more approachable.

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Nigella’s Granny Boyd’s Biscuits

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I have always faltered at getting the timing right; I either play my cards so soon they haven’t yet been dealt, or I over-project meaning onto something and never get to achieve it at all. On my birthday two years ago I found — in a moment of pure magic that I still haven’t processed — Judy Holliday’s 1958 Trouble is a Man record, a circle of vinyl I didn’t even know existed in New Zealand, let alone for me, let alone on my birthday. For some reason, I promised myself that I wouldn’t listen to it until I had my very own space, beholden to no one but myself and my whims (and also my landlord) and that alone would be the perfect context to finally absorb this record. Two years and then some passed, and I have, as of December 1st, at last moved into a place where I am the only resident, and yet — I don’t know, it still just hasn’t been quite right, I haven’t been in the right frame of mind, and so I still haven’t listened to this record despite it meaning the world to me.

I have, however, made some cookies, and I baked a loaf of bread, and both were Nigella Lawson recipes, so despite my existential fumbling for the needlessly unattainable, this new place is undeniably mine, all mine now. (And my landlord’s. But for the purposes of romantic drollery: mine, all mine.) If in doubt, Nigella. If really in doubt: Nigella and chocolate.

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kūmara chocolate button cookies

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Even someone as relatively jaded as I can occasionally still have my brain rewired by a tweet, for example, the claim by Folu (of Unsnackable acclaim) that chocolate chip cookies should have 30% less chocolate. (And I am nothing if not a scholar; historians found records of this opinion dating as far back as 2014.) It seems counter-intuitive — what, after all, is the point of chocolate if not to push you to take its presence to the extreme in every possible application — and yet it makes sense; cookies themselves should be the main character, not a merely tolerated and oversaturated vessel, if you want it that much just eat some chocolate. It was this tweet that guided my hand while making these kūmara chocolate button cookies; each softly mountainous ball of dough holds three chocolate buttons, tops, and that contained rarity only adds to the chocolate’s allure.

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