Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #320548 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

Very O.K.
The photos are beautiful and the ideas are great, but a lot of the recipes couldn't possibly have been tested. The coconut ice cream recipe makes a completely bland (only 2 tablespoons of sugar are called for and all the coconut products in the recipe are unsweetened), rock hard ice cream, even when made with a professional machine.

Delicious frozen desserts
"A Passion for Ice Cream" is not simply a book of recipes for ice cream itself, although it might be easy to mistake it for that from the title alone. Instead it's book of ice cream desserts (and other frozen desserts). For instance, you'll find caramelized apple and butter pecan ice cream sundaes, chocolate-covered-pretzel ice cream ball fondue, chocolate-coated cocoa nib florentines and orange ice-cream sandwiches, black mission fig and raspberry parfaits, chocolate banana baked Alaskas, mango soup with coconut sherbet and strawberry sorbet, and warm blueberry filo stacks with Grand Marnier ice cream. As you can see, these aren't simple "mix, put it in the ice cream maker, and forget it" recipes. This is not a negative--sometimes it's a ton of fun to make such elaborate and beautiful desserts--but you should know what you're getting yourself into before you decide to buy this book.

When it comes to actual performance, the recipes exhibited the quality of testing I'm accustomed to from Chronicle Books. I never found a confusing set of directions or obvious error. Two of the recipes from this book found immediate places in our stable of favorites--the brown sugar ice cream in its chocolate cake roulade (with warm coffee caramel sauce!) is a bit messy, but so incredibly delicious that no one will care. The white chocolate ice cream (destined to float in espresso according to the recipe, but I enjoy it plain, or in coffee or hot chocolate...) is one of the best white chocolate ice creams I've ever had. The only sour note was a Cafe Viennese frozen yogurt shake; it was so tart we had to add sweetened cocoa powder in noticeable quantities to make it enjoyable. And while it's good enough that we finished it, I don't think we'd make it again.

Ultimately, while you'll want to make sure you're up to the kind of in-depth recipes in this book before buying it, it's a high-quality cookbook that produces delicious results. I look forward to making yet more recipes out of it!

A Step Close to Heaven
I confess. The first thing that I did after I picked up this book was head for an ice cream shop just to get a fix so that I could get through it. Just sitting there spooning in a bit of ice cream while reading about ice cream is about as close to nirvana that I can imagine. Except that it would be even better if the ice cream were home made.

I don't know why, but home made ice cream is almost always better than what you get at even the best ice cream shops. I've been making ice cream as long as I can remember, and that's a pretty long time. This is the first cook book that I've seen that is ice cream, ice cream and only ice cream. Well, let me expand that a little, there are indeed other things here, but they are ice cream related, i.e. ice cream sandwitches, ice cream floats, shakes, sundaes -- things like that. And after all, you can't expect to live by ice cream alone.

What I really liked: All the different flavors, all the different dishes.

Complaint: the type is too small for my old eyes. BUT getting a kid to read it and feel part of the process is too much fun to be missed.