Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield - Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book

Previously, I have reviewed cookbooks from The Hummingbird Bakery after I have made at least one of the recipes so I decided, after making something out of this book, that I would review this one as it was different and I thought others would like to know how good this book was.

Hopefully you know what the Ben & Jerry's company produces because it is a good product, lovely ice cream and frozen yoghurt, and while in the UK we don't have all of the flavours that the Americans do, the ones we do have are extremely popular.  For my 21st birthday, one of my best friends from university bought me this brilliant book because she knows how much I like to cook for others as I used to make cakes for birthdays and such but I had never made ice cream so it was something new to do.

As I can't make every single recipe in this book before reviewing it as it would take too long and I quite frankly might be sick of ice cream by that point, I decided to review one recipe that would go down well in my house, the coconut ice cream as my sister, mum, and I love coconut reika at Wagamama's which is basically ice cream.

The instructions were simple to read and carry through and though they are written with the American measurements (cups) while British tend to work with ounces and grams so you just need to get a cup measurer to make the recipes in this book.  As well as working in cups, the ingredients are called something different so I added a list at the bottom of the review with a rough translation.

What's great about the Ben & Jerry's book is that there are three recipes to make a basic base recipe, going from an extra creamy flavour to a more cooked one; each one can allow you to make your own

The coconut one was extremely simple to do because I used the creamy base recipe with a can of coconut milk as I was able to dump everything into my freestanding mixer and let it mix up before putting it into my ice cream mixer so it would partially freeze.  Once the ice cream mixer was done, I put the ice cream in the freezer to freeze further until it had the right consistency to eat it.

Upon eating the delicious creation, my family said that they were first hit by the creamy texture of the ice cream then they got a second wave of coconut and described it as a taste sensation so they highly recommend that anyone to make it because it was so simple but tasted so great.

I have decided that I'm going to make a different recipe later on so I can see what others are like and share that with you, such as fruit flavoured ones and ones with chunks in.  Look out for more blogs about this book, reviewing the simplicity and the taste of that particular recipe.

Simple Translation

Heavy cream is double cream

Light cream is single cream

Half-and-half is half cream half whole milk