Yes, You Can Make Ice Cream Buns at Home
It seems that ice cream has become more and more about optics. It is not enough to have a simple scoop in a cone; it should be in the mouth of the fish or accompanied by a whole slice of pie . The ice cream rolls fit into the visually appealing crowd, but they have an elegant simplicity that these other Instagram-compatible dairy desserts lack. If you’ve never seen a video of them filming, it’s just mesmerizing.
When our editor-in-chief recently noticed a sudden surge of enthusiasm for ice cream, she asked me if they could be made at home. Although I’m a lover of ice cream and ice cream tricks, at first I was not completely thrilled to take on the task. It sounded – how to say? – like a pain in the ass.
But while I hate the headache, I love challenges, and I also love the opportunity to spend money on ice cream. I quickly googled the ice cream rollers and found one guide that suggested freezing the ice cream dough in a skillet and then scraping it off that skillet. It seemed to work, but it limits your options. Unless you have a very large freezer and lots of pans, you can only make one or two of them at a time, and what’s the point of rolling out ice cream if you can’t impress a bunch of people?
No, my friends, we need a work surface on which we can roll out many ice cream sheets. To do this, we need something cooler than being cool. In fact, we need something even cooler than “icy cold”. We need a dry ice cold.
We also need ice cream. You can make your own dough and I would like to thank you for that, but (at least for me) ice cream buns are more about shape and I wanted to see if I could use the ice cream that I already made to shape our rolls, so that I bought a tub of cheap vanilla.
After I had dry ice and ice cream, I wrapped the ice in a towel and hit it with a hammer to break it into pieces. I then filled the hotel pot with frozen carbon dioxide and let it cool slightly. (Safety note: Be very careful when handling dry ice and do not let it touch your bare skin. Wear oven mitts or something similar.)
After about five minutes, I (carefully) put the dry ice in the refrigerator and poured some very melted ice cream into the pan. Using a chilled dough scraper, I spread it very thinly – just like in the video – then tried to scrape it off the pan into an elegant roll.
This does not work. Instead of rolls, I had ice cream shards, but the good news is that they were still quite edible and delicious. They were similar to Dippin Dots, but in leaf shape. I tried a few more in the frying pan, but as soon as I started to realize it, I was disappointed to find that the frying pan was too hot to keep rolling.
I was about to wash and refill the pan when I noticed that the marble slab it was on was still quite cold. It reminded me of the marble slabs in creameries with the aptly named Marble Slab Creameries that I used to frequent when I was young, so I thought I’d roll this surface.
I rinsed and refilled the pan, put some dry ice in it again and put it on the stove for 10 minutes. Then I scooped up more ice cream and went back to scraping.
I had to give the first “roll” a little longer, because it was not a roll at all, but a very stiff sheet.
I tried again, this time working faster, letting the ice cream hang for only a few seconds after I laid it out.
It was better that way, but I still needed to act faster . I scooped up some more vanilla, spread it out again, and scraped off at an angle as soon as I put it down.
I did this a few more times until I got three acceptable rolls.
But what about blending? Part of the fun of an ice cream roll is being able to add cookies, cakes and the like to your creation. I always have Oreos at home, so I crumbled a few and sprinkled them with ice cream, then used a dough scraper to spread the cookies evenly.
I then spread and scraped as before, again working very quickly to prevent ice cream chunks and chunks from forming.
As you can see, the ice cream was a little more difficult to roll out because of the cookie slices, but it seems like we got there. Make sure you break everything down into very small pieces for the best result.
So yeah, you can make your own ice cream buns at home, you just need dry ice, a marble slab, some kind of scraper, and a lot of patience. I don’t know your life, so I’ll let you decide “is it worth it.” However, once you get the hang of it, it can be quite fun, and – even if you do fail a lot – at least your failure tastes good.