Homemade Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream

During the summer months, especially, my husband and I love to make homemade ice cream.  James is a big fan of licking the spare ice cream off the beater when the ice cream has finished churning.  I enjoy looking for new recipes to try and test out because sometimes you can find a real keeper.  That is exactly what happened the last time we made ice cream.  I found a recipe for Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream, and boy, was it delicious!

http://www.joythebaker.com/blog/2008/07/double-chocolate-peanut-butter-ice-cream/

I did make a few changes from the original recipe, but that is just because of the items I had on hand.  Instead of using semi sweet chocolate, I used bittersweet.  I believe the bittersweet chocolate made the ice cream even more intense in flavor...it is extremely rich.  Also I don't think I cooked my chocolate mixture quite long enough...next time I will wait for it to be a thicker pudding type texture.  Mine was the consistency of cooked pudding...it would coat the wooden spoon, but it wasn't that thick...if that makes sense.  Also the ice cream itself did not set up well in the ice cream maker...we decided it was because we didn't let the mixture cool long enough in the fridge beforehand.  I also decided that next time we make this flavor, because believe me, there will be a next time, when I fold in the peanut butter at the very end, I will put smaller globs of peanut butter in at a time...I made the mistake of taking my whole 1/4 cup and plopping it right in mostly together which creating a few huge chunks of peanut butter in the final result.

We ate some of the ice cream the same night we made it (once again not letting it set long enough in the freezer), and it was tasty even though the peanut butter was quite soft still.  Then the remaining ice cream we ate the following day was amazing...the consistency and flavor of the stuff you buy at the ice cream shops. 

Fair warning, this only makes a small portion.  If you plan on feeding several people, I would definitely increase the amount.

The ice cream is decadently delicious! I highly recommend trying it if you are a lover of chocolate and peanut butter.