Why make your own ice cream? For me, it was a matter of what to do with an elegant surfeit of both strawberries and cream left over from the previous weekend's adventures. Waste not, want not, make ice cream. But the real reason was revealed almost as soon as the paddle was out of the bucket: It makes people happy! A carton of Ben & Jerry's may be insurance against a bad day, a cone at Bi-Rite good for fun in the sun, but homemade ice cream is a party.

And you don't even have to own an ice-cream maker. That's what Facebook is for: put out a call for help and a hour later you'll have friends all around the city dusting off their mostly-unused wedding presents for the promise of mocha-chip. Krups? Cuisinart? Whaddya want? 24 hours and a helpful neighbor later, I had a tub of pink deliciousness on hand, rich, creamy and infused with ripe berry flavor. No eggs, no custard fussiness, just cream, sugar, and strawberries: pure summery bliss.

Wait, it took 24 hours to make that ice cream? Well, not exactly. But you do have to start the process the day before you want to eat your cone. Yes, this is a drag; after all, what is ice cream but an impulsive treat, and if all you want is five minutes' instant gratification (not a bad thing, by any means), then you might as well go down to Joe's or Mitchell's, hand over your money and be done with it.

But, like I said, there's something about homemade ice cream that draws a crowd, turning any afternoon gathering into a celebration. Plus, once everything's good to go (more on that below), the actual churning process takes less than 45 minutes and is quite fun to watch. It's liquid, it's slushy liquid, wow, it's ice cream, whipping around and around, getting fluffier by the minute!

Why the delay? Most ice cream recipes call for heating the cream, milk, and sugar to a gentle steam in order to dissolve the granules. So first it's hot, then after a hour of sitting around, it's room temp. Still not good enough, since what you want is a very short road from cream to slush to frozen velvet, achieved only by chilling the mixture in the fridge for at least four or five hours, until icy cold. Meanwhile, unless your rich uncle has bequeathed you his Pacojet, you'll also probably need to freeze the container of your ice-cream maker for a good 24 hours before using.

So, yes, plan ahead. As the sternly worded, multi-lingual instructions for the ice-cream maker will tell you, trying to rush will lead only to tears, frustration, and why-isn't-this-working-Dad??

(Then again, settling for an It's It isn't the worst thing that could happen. Ah, It's Its, how I love them! Just one of the many things to cherish about our fair city. The unexpected flavors, like cappuccino and mint; the little picture of the chocolate coating flowing like lava over the oatmeal cookies: all in all, a masterpiece of corner-store gustatory seduction, if you ask me.)

And while your paddle is churning away, doing all the work for you, you can dip into Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making, by Jeri Quinzio. Quinzio, a food historian and the author a previous book on ice cream, leaves no Eskimo Pie unexamined in her painstakingly detailed exploration of ice-cream making from its beginnings in mid-16th century Europe to its meteoric rise in popularity during the early years of the 20th century in America. As you might expect from a book capped with 23 pages of scholarly citations (and funded by the University of California Press Foundation, as part of its California Studies in Food and Culture series), the accretion of minutia (Want to know exactly who first held the patent on the ice-cream cone? Or the many apocryphal stories of its invention? Or how fancy versions were once piped with icing around the top, dusted with chopped pistachios, filled with a mixture of ginger ice and apple ice cream and finally served on a doily-lined silver tray?) can be a little mind-numbing.

Quinzio, although clearly a dogged researcher, is no Mark Kurlansky, a writer who can make even the most ordinary of topics (cod, salt) into rollicking good reads. You really have to want to know what Quinzio has to share, but for those with a serious appetite for culinary history, the nuggets can be worth it. Who knew, for example that ice cream was aligned with the anti-alcohol Temperance Movement, posited as the family man's happy-making substitute for beer?

Surely even Quinzio would forgive you for putting down her 200-page magnum opus in exchange for a spoon, a banana, and a maraschino cherry. Think all your pals are too busy these days to get together without 3 weeks' notice? Just put out the magic call--There's homemade ice cream in my freezer! Who wants a cone?--and the doorbell will ring, I promise you. Very quickly, I discovered that I couldn't stop at strawberry. With recipes from Ina Gartner's book Barefoot Contessa Parties! on hand, I soon had a freezer full of homemade vanilla, caramel, and bourbon-caramel to go with the strawberry. Which led, even faster, to a whole bunch of impromptu parties, buoyed by tea, champagne, bowls of cherries and plates of fancy little cookies. Easy, sweet, and perfect for summer.

Strawberry Ice Cream
Proportions are pretty flexible here; if you want a less rich (but slightly icier) ice cream, you could use half milk and half cream. The sweetness will get less pronounced once the mixture is frozen, so keep that in mind as you sugar your berries.

Makes 1 quart

Ingredients
4 cups heavy cream
1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar, depending on sweetness of berries
pinch of salt
2 pint baskets ripe, fragrant strawberries, hulled and roughly chopped

Preparation
1. Over low heat in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, warm cream, 1/4 cup sugar, and salt until sugar is dissolved and cream is hot but not boiling. (Boiling will make the cream separate, not what you want.) Remove from heat and let cool.

2. Meanwhile, mix strawberries with 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar. Crush some of the berries with the back of a spoon. Let berries sit, covered, at room temperature, stirring occasionally, until sugar is dissolved and berries have released their juice. Taste strawberry mixture for sweetness, adding more sugar as necessary.

3. Refrigerate cream and strawberry mixtures separately for several hours or overnight, until very cold.

4. Mix strawberries and cream together. Assemble ice cream maker and pour in strawberry mixture, freezing according to manufacturer's directions. When it's thick and fluffy and looks like ice cream, scoop it into a freezer-safe container and let harden in the freezer for a few hours. Or hand out spoons to your favorite people and eat it all up right there.

Since this is my first go around with BAB I wanted to introduce myself with something short, creamy, cold and sweet. As for me, I'm simply a cook with food dreams and an active imagination. And lucky for me, cooking is also my profession.

Like clockwork, as local strawberries start to trickle in, so do the slew of seasonal recipes that appear in print and in tons of blogs. Timeless dishes such as trifle, shortcakes, pie, creams and custards consume the majority of the recipes indexes. Yes, of course, they all have merit and nothing beats a perfectly ripe strawberry, but what drives my imagination as a cook is coming up with something new and innovative. This concoction came to my mind while recently looking over an image for a strawberry milkshake.

As much as I love fruit milkshakes they sometimes taste weak as the fruit gets lost in sweet dairy notes or in heaps of sugar. So, how do you make something more pronounced and less diluted? Or better put, how do you get a particular ingredient to come to the surface. In the cooking world the techniques we usually apply are centered towards reducing, roasting or dehydrating; this makes foods more complex and sharp. With vegetables and fruits roasting and dehydrating extracts the natural sugars making them more intensely sweet. My good friend Chef Roger Feely turned me on to slow roasting strawberries years ago as something spectacular to garnish desserts with. I have been consumed with them ever since! And just like that, while glancing at that image for the strawberry milkshake this shake idea was born.

I give credit to our pastry chef Juliann for the malt ball idea. She suggest malted chocolate as a complimentary garnish with good symmetry for the shake, but when the words soy lecithin and foam came into the conversation I shut down and decided to go conventional. Great flavor combo, so thanks for the suggestion Juliann!

I'm pretty sure this is an original so I'm very happy to bring it to you fresh on BAB!

Slow Roasted Strawberry Milkshake with Crushed Malt Balls

Makes: 2-3 servings

Ingredients:

For the Strawberries:
1 pound strawberries, tops removed and halved
¼ cup sugar
1 fresh vanilla bean, seeds removed
Pinch salt

For the Shake:
1 pint, super premium ice cream (16% fat, low air)
¾ cup whole milk
¾ of the roast strawberries; save some for garnish

Garnish:
2-3 roast strawberry halves
1 tablespoon of crushed malt balls

Preparation:

1. Turn on oven to 250 degrees, Fahrenheit
2. Scrape out the seeds from the vanilla bean
3. Break up the clump of vanilla seeds with finger tips.
4. Toss the berries with sugar, salt and vanilla bean.
5. Slow cook in oven for 2 hours, uncovered, pull and let cool
6. Crush 6 malt balls with a mallet or heavy pan
7. Place ice cream in blender with milk, strawberries and some reserved syrup. Blend until just mixed. Thin it out with milk if too thick.
8. Pour into glasses and garnish with reserved strawberries, syrup and crushed malt balls

Although the calendar says it's only May, it feels more like July this week. My kids are begging to go to the pool every day and I'm craving ice cream. Strawberry ice cream to be specific. Strawberries are in full season in all their sweet glory and what better way to stave off the heat than to indulge in icy cream and fresh berries.

I have often made strawberry ice cream using heavy cream, berries, sugar and not much else. Although these desserts have been creamy and sweet, they were a bit lacking. Without eggs, ice cream just doesn't have the full body and character I'm looking for in my dessert. I have hunted for years for the perfect strawberry ice cream recipe, but most use between 6 and 9 egg yolks. Now I love egg custards (and ice cream made with eggs is essentially just frozen custard), but the more eggs included in a custard, the richer the flavor. Although this can often be a very good thing -- such as with vanilla, pecan or chocolate ice creams -- the richness of too many eggs in custard can detract from the natural sweetness of any fruit you add to it, flattening the flavors. Plus eggs are high in cholesterol and fat, so if I can, I try to avoid them in abundance. What I wanted was a lighter strawberry ice cream with the depth of flavor eggs provide, without overshadowing the strawberries and casting them out of the limelight (or raising my LDL levels).

I recently read a NY Times article that used a pudding recipe for ice cream. The problem is that it uses 8 egg yolks (yes, 8!). I remembered that my pudding recipe is thick and creamy and only uses a couple of eggs, which seemed much more reasonable. I decided to tweak it a little, however, using strawberries instead of chocolate. I also added one extra egg yolk to help bind the ice cream as I was worried the strawberries -- which naturally have a lot of water in them -- would make the custard runny. Heavy cream also seemed a better choice than the whole milk I use in my pudding as this is ice cream we're making, not ice milk. My final alteration was to include some lemon juice and zest to help brighten the strawberry flavors. Finally I plopped everything into the beautiful ice cream maker my husband's aunt bought us a few years ago (thank you Aunt Susie!) with excellent results. The final product had a deep strawberry taste, a rich and creamy texture, and a more complex flavor than the plain cream strawberry ice cream I've made for years. It also allowed the strawberries to star, unlike some custard ice creams I've tried. And best of all, it helped cool us off during this heat wave.

Fresh Strawberry Ice Cream

Makes 4 - 8 servings

Ingredients
3 cups of fresh strawberries (cleaned, hulled and chopped)
½ cup plus 3 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
Zest from one medium lemon
3 large egg yolks
3 Tbsp corn starch
Dash of salt
2 cups heavy cream
1 tsp vanilla extract

Preparation
1. Puree 2 cups of the strawberries with 3 Tbsp sugar and the lemon juice. Cut up the third cup of berries, mix them with the 4th tablespoon of sugar, and set aside.

2. Heat the heavy cream on medium-low until it starts to steam with small bubbles around the edge. Turn off the heat.
3. Whisk egg yolks with ½ cup sugar in a bowl until the mixture is a light yellow color.
4. Add the lemon zest, corn starch, and salt to the egg mixture and whisk thoroughly, making sure there are no lumps.
5. Add about a half cup of the warmed cream to the egg mixture, whisking vigorously to temper the eggs.
6. Add the egg mixture to the cream and incorporate thoroughly.
7. Cook on medium-low just until the mixture starts to bubble. Be sure to frequently stir or the mixture will start to burn at the bottom. I used a whisk, but a spatula would also work.
8. When the mixture becomes thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, turn off the heat and add the strawberry puree.
9. Stir in the vanilla.
10. Chill in an ice bath.
11. Cover with plastic wrap, being sure to let it sit directly on top of the pudding to avoid a skin forming.
12. Refrigerate until fully cooled.
13. Place mixture in your ice cream maker, along with the last cup of berries you set aside in Step 1, and then let it do its thing for about twenty minutes.
14. Place in a container and place in the freezer. Stir every hour or so until firm so it evenly freezes.
15. Serve.

Tips:
1. If you do not have an ice cream maker, you can still make homemade ice cream. David Lebovitz shows you how to make ice cream without a machine.

2. This recipe would also be great using peaches, nectarines, plums, or any other type of berry.