TWD: Peach-Honey Ice Cream

I'm baaaaaack! Peru was amazing. We hiked the Inca Trail up to Machu Picchu:

And visited various islands on Lake Titicaca, including these crazy floating islands made entirely of reeds:

We explored the rainforest and saw way too many enormous insects and spiders, but also lots of cool stuff, like a whole family of capybaras! Check out the little babies near the bottom. Awwww.We also visited some OG markets in the bigger cities and expanded our pansy American culinary sensibilities:


One of the best parts was stalking the local wildlife and taking photos with whatever poor animal was too slow to evade my grasp. I have tons of pics like these:

Clockwise from top left: rare Andean deer, alpaca (not llama!), tuckered out donkey, Peruvian hairless dog.

However, after several weeks of frequent travel, erratic meals, days without electricity, bathrooms without toilet seats, and non-potable tap water, we are glad to be back home. I am also excited to get back to my dessert (and dessert-blogging) routine. No offense to my Peruvian peeps, but I was decidedly underwhelmed with the desserts we tried. When plain old ice cream is consistently the best thing on the menu, something is wrong.

I guess all the ice cream tasting was in preparation for this week's TWD recipe, though. And what perfect timing: peach-honey ice cream to welcome in the official start of summer next week.

I'm not usually a huge ice cream person, but I was excited about this recipe for nostalgic reasons. Growing up, we had several peach trees in our backyard that always produced tons of peaches every summer. So my childhood is marked by canning peach slices, making sticky peach jam, luscious peach cobblers and pies, and of course, homemade peach ice cream. We had an old machine that used rock salt and ice, and I still remember the vibrant, creamy ice cream bursting with chunks of soft peaches. Well, friends, here is the sad truth: the hard little stones sold as "peaches" at my local market are poor imitators of the soft, juicy, bursting-with-flavor peaches I remember from my childhood backyard. And try as I might, my nostalgia is no match for their bland taste and texture. So while I didn't think this ice cream was bad (on the contrary, I liked the honey addition, and thought the texture was perfect) the lack of strong peach flavor was really disappointing. I may have to try this recipe again the next time I visit my folks and have access to real peaches.

But I can say that the spiced sables I made to accompany the ice cream were terrific. These were based on Dorie's basic sable recipe, and they're absolutely perfect. Love the extra hint of salt, and the sandy texture.

I would also be interested to try this with apricots or plums instead--maybe those'll prove to have a bit more flavor. Happy summer, everyone!