Book Review: Ice Cream Happy Hour

It’s never too early to get ready for summer. As the temperatures here begin to drop into the 50s and 60s, we’re already making preparations for next summer by trying a few recipes from the new cookbook, Ice Cream Happy Hour, by Valerie Lum and Jenise Addison. The book includes over 50 recipes for ice creams, sorbets, sundaes, and floats. The book is unique in that all of these desserts “merry” ice cream with alcohol to create a host of uniquely delicious desserts.

Authors Lum and Addison met while working together at a boutique beer shop in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. One night after work, they had a craving for a root beer float when they wondered what a chocolate stout float might taste like instead. Through trial and error they developed this and many other recipes included in Ice Cream Happy Hour. One key step that makes many of these recipes possible was in fact perfected by authors Lum and Addison. This technique is the process of combining alcohol spiked gelatin with custard to make booze infused ice cream.

We tried two recipes from Ice Cream Happy Hour. The first was Maple with Bourbon Ice Cream. This recipe takes a little patience since you have to wait several hours for the custard to cool completely before spiking and churning it to get the ice cream. However, the end result was a restaurant grade dessert with perfect texture and flavor. The second recipe that we tried was the Margarita Sorbet. This recipe had fewer steps and was easier to make. This dessert tasted just like a frozen margarita in sorbet form. We really liked this book because it gives you a basic set of steps that are used to make all of the recipes. Once you have tried a few of the desserts, you have all of the tools that you need to make your own creations. We give this book four out of five stars.