Chocolate Peppermint Ice Cream

I had leftover cream that needed to be used, and while I still have coconut ice cream (and coconut curry) left, I decided to make some more! Going through my cabinets looking for things that needed to be used before I leave in a month for DC (working with the National Family Farm Coalition for the policy part of the fellowship!!...more on that soon) and I found coco powder and peppermint extract, so I thought hmmm...chocolate peppermint ice cream! i also used extra crushed up peppermint candies left over from the chocolate bark (and peppermint bark ice cream). I was going to use actual peppermint bark to make chocolate peppermint bark ice cream, but I forgot to crush up the chocolate pieces in time...but this still works!


I kind of combined two recipes for this. I mixed the basic fresh vanilla ice cream recipe and the chocolate recipe, since there were things I didn't love about the chocolate recipe itsself, mainly using more milk than cream (a big no-no I have found), and using more eggs than I normally use. So I used:

1.5 C whole milk
3/4 C sugar
1/3 C coco powder
3 egg yolks
2 C heavy whipping cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
2-3 Tbsp peppermint extract
1 C crushed up peppermint candies

For the extract, I recommend going by taste here. I kept adding it in teaspoon at a time and it continued to need more! After a while, a good amount dripped onto my hand and then my skin felt an odd cooling/tingling/burning sensation for a good two hours. Try not to do that...But I would say after about 3 Tbsp, you could really begin to taste the peppermint and chocolate at a nice balance. (For ice cream making procedure, follow one of the other ice cream recipe posts!)

This was a really rich and creamy batch of ice cream. So good!!