An Interview with Ice Cream Queen Koralee Teichroeb

As many of you know (or could guess by now), I am an ice cream addict. So much so that when I got married, an ice cream maker was at the TOP of my wedding registry must haves. And I got one. Thanks to Hillary for that one. ;) I've been using it ever since. When Everything Goes with Ice Cream hit the shelves, I knew this would be a book I'd HAVE to own. And it totally is. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Koralee about her amazing book. Here's what she had to say.

 

Check out Koralee's blog Bluebird Notes here. 

 

Why ice cream?

Growing up, ice cream was one of our favorite desserts. We always had ice cream in our freezer. My dad is an ice cream fanatic, so I blame him for getting me hooked. His favorite is butter pecan or maple walnut (my book has a to-die-for praline ice cream recipe that is so worthy of my father’s distinctive taste buds). Then in my teen years we owned a Dairy Queen…need I say more! Pure heaven on earth. So with all my childhood ice cream exposure, I guess an ice cream book was the perfect match for me.

  

What’s your favorite flavor? Favorite topping?

My favorite flavor in the book is my red velvet homemade ice cream, but a close second is my pumpkin pie homemade ice cream (so much like eating a slice of your mom’s Thanksgiving pumpkin pie). Both can be found in my "Scratch" chapter.

 

My favorite topping would have to be Jo’s Chocolate Sauce along with her White Chocolate Covered Popcorn poured over top of the salted caramel ice cream. The combination of sweet, salty and crunchy makes my taste buds SING! I could eat this all day long.

What was the best part of working on Everything Goes With Ice Cream?

Hands down all the tasting we did! Between me, my girls, my son-in-law, and my husband, we were always testing something. My freezer was always filled to the brim with ice cream; a bad thing or a good thing depending on how you look at it.

Many new family favorites have come out of this book. I see some family traditions developing. My son-in-law's birthday request dessert every year now will be my lemon blueberry ice cream pie made with the tangiest lemon curd. He absolutely loves this dessert and has requested it again for his upcoming birthday ...just add candles!

 

What’s your process for creating recipes?

Well a lot of trial and error took place. Some recipes are your basic ice cream recipes that I may have tweaked a little bit (standard vanilla, which is a must in developing other recipes like the Sprucing up the Vanilla recipes found in each chapter). While others I developed through ideas that I had. Some worked some didn't. But it was always about having fun and test tasting everything. 

What’s your favorite recipe? Why?

My Cranberry Pistachio Ice Cream Chateaus found in my festive chapter is a winner. It is the perfect elegant dessert for Christmas or New Years. It really has all the flavors and colors of Christmas in an ice cream; cinnamon, red cranberries, green pistachios, white toasted slivered almonds and covered with white chocolate. It is very easy to make and looks so festive.

 

I even changed this recipe for my Think Pink Christmas in Matthew Mead's holiday book by making the vanilla ice cream pink by adding a dash of food coloring, but of course you could use a pink peppermint ice cream instead which would be equally delicious. That is the beauty of most of my recipes; they can be tweaked to individual taste buds. 

My book is not all about ice cream, I feature many non-ice cream treats as well. One of these is my pink cinnamon buns! These were a BIG hit on my blog and so I knew I just had to include them in my book.

 

Have you ever had a recipe disaster? If so, what happened and how did you overcome it?

Well, because I did all my own photography and most of the recipes where developed and photographed in the heat of summer, I had the occasional “melt down”(both me and the ice cream). Not having any experience photographing ice cream before it really gave me a challenge. When my book was all done someone told me that mashed potatoes are used instead of ice cream for editorial shoots because it can look a lot like ice cream. I kind of chuckled to myself as I was thinking that mashed potatoes would have been a lot of extra work for me even though I still had to deal with the melting factor of real ice cream.

Some of the most frustrating photos were the ice cream bombes, which happened to be picked for the cover photo by the publisher. Those bombes just wanted to slip right off the cake platters so many times. It was on one of our hottest days of the summer that I needed some outside shots and even inside we had no air conditioning. My daughter and I were laughing so hard, we really thought these bombes had BOMBED!

 

What ice cream maker would you recommend and why?

I use the Cuisinart ICE-30BCC Pure Indulgence(TM) Frozen Yogurt-Ice Cream & Sorbet Maker. I find it is such an easy machine to use and a breeze to clean. It is quite affordable and the results are always amazing. I would highly recommend the purchase of an ice cream maker; it really does make making ice cream easy and fun.

The book is Everything Goes with Ice Cream. If you're an ice cream lover, you need to pick this one up. AND we're GIVING AWAY a copy of this delicious book tomorrow (along with a couple of recipes). Stay tuned.

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Everything goes with ice cream—yet we understand that the perfect dessert for all of us is not always a big bowl of ice cream. Not everyone loves ice cream, as hard as it is to believe! Which is why Everything Goes with Ice Cream is the book for all of us. It does, of course, have the easy-to-make homemade ice cream, but it also has 176 pages filled with other ideas for making a summertime snack covered in made-from-scratch sea blue candy sprinkles; s'mores and hot chocolate for winter; or an ooey gooey dessert whose magic ingredient is, of course, chunky chocolate fresh raspberry ice cream. Simple projects fill the pages too, including tiny candles made in tea cups, miniature no-sew cake banners, party pom poms, heart-shaped button covers for a special party blouse, and so many more.

 
Everything Goes with Ice Cream is filled with cute ideas, a fun layout, and fabulous photography to make you as happy as you are on a summer day with your grammy's fresh peach ice cream pops covered in orange frosting sprinkles!