Some miscellaneous experiments with ice cream flavors: salted caramel, bubble gum, and more.

I’ve been experimenting with some of the ice cream flavorings from LorAnn Oils recently. I tried their Butter Pecan, Salted Caramel, Bubble Gum, and Caramel Delight. There’s no need to provide an in-depth recipe since it’s simply a sweet cream base plus a tablespoon of flavoring.

Butter Pecan

This flavor was very disappointing, but not unexpectedly so. Butter Pecan from the Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book book is one of my all-time favorites. Heck, an entire stick of butter is added to the mix! What possible hope could this flavoring extract have over real butter?

I can’t recommend this as an ice cream flavoring, but I do have an idea where else it could be used: low carb pancake syrup. One of my favorite syrups at IHOP was the butter pecan flavor. I suspect adding this to a bottle of no sugar pancake syrup might help recreate that lost delicacy.

Salted Caramel

If you’ve been keeping an eye on new ice cream flavors, salted caramel is one of the newest and brightest stars. Low carb caramel is an oxymoron since caramel is caramelized sugar. Low carb caramel syrups and dips do exist and taste pretty good, but they don’t freeze well. I know; I tried. I even tried adding a swirl of caramel to this ice cream, but it got lost in the mix after it froze.

The ice cream produced from this fountain flavor is really good. However, I don’t expect it to be very similar to sugar-based salted caramel ice creams. Without pralines or any other solids added to the mix, it gets a little boring. I’ll try to think up a good pairing for this base, but overall it gets definite thumbs up from me.

Bubble Gum

My plan was to add sugar-free bubble gum to the mix, but I never actually did. I was afraid of the laxative effect that much gum would have in a single serving of ice cream. I have to say that the flavor was pretty spot on. It does taste like pink bubble gum. However, I don’t think it’s something I’d want a whole scoop of without something else to break up the monotony. It gets a thumbs up for flavor, but it’s just not a flavor I personally desire.

Caramel Delight

This is a sweet caramel flavor that I found tasted even better than the salted caramel. Caramel is usually added to a vanilla or chocolate ice cream base as a solid. It’s great in the mix, but the resulting ice cream screams for something else to be added. A big thumbs up for this flavor, but I need to think of something to pair it with.