5 Ingredients or Fewer

Kids, naturally, love this ice cream. And it’s easy enough that kids can put it together themselves with a minimum of help from Mom or Dad. To make it even more fun, layer in a swirl of their favorite jam.

There’s nothing like the pleasant crunch of crisp, freshly toasted nuts. And there’s nothing worse than biting into an acrid, rancid nut. Since nuts have a relatively high amount of oil, you should taste a couple before using them to make sure they’re still fresh. Hazelnuts, pecans, and walnuts are particularly susceptible to spoilage. Buy nuts from a store that sells in high volume and turns over its stock regularly and store them in a cool, dark place in a well-sealed container. Nuts can also be frozen in zip-top freezer bags. Most nuts taste much better if they’ve been toasted, which brings out their flavors and gives them a crunchy contrast in ice cream. The only nuts I don’t toast are pistachio nuts, since they’ll lose their delicate green color. Buy fresh pistachios from a good source so they’re crisp and vibrant green.

If you’ve never made crêpes before, you’ll find that it’s one of life’s most satisfying accomplishments. You spend a few minutes dipping, swirling, and flipping and end up with a neat stack of delicious crêpes. As with traditional pancakes, the first one is usually a dud, so don’t be discouraged. Once you’ve slid a few out of the frying pan, you’ll feel like a pro. This recipe can easily be doubled and they freeze beautifully, so there’s no reason not to keep an extra stack in the freezer for a last-minute crêpe fix.

Crispy nests of meringue—also known as vacherins—add a certain savoir faire and offer a very dramatic presentation for any ice cream or sorbet, especially when you add a ladleful of sauce as well. The combination of crackly meringue, luscious ice cream, and a complimentary sauce is justifiably known as one of the great French dessert classics. It is certain to become a well-loved part of your repertoire as well. Use a deft hand when folding in the confectioners’ sugar. Aggressive overmixing can cause the meringue to start deflating.

When I was at culinary school in France, my instructor advised adding a bit of salt when candying citrus peel. When I asked why, he said that for some reason it made the peel soften, but he couldn’t explain why. So although it may be just a culinary superstition, I’ve added salt ever since. If you aren’t superstitious, simply toss the salt over your shoulder and candy the lemons without it. Although it’s not required equipment, a candy thermometer will show you when the lemon slices are done. Fit the saucepan with the thermometer before starting. When the peel is candied, it should read 225°F (107°C).

These marshmallows are chewy and compact, designed to be folded into ice cream. They are indispensable in Rocky Road Ice Cream (page 26) but can be deliciously added to lots of other flavors as well. To measure powdered gelatin, open the envelopes and measure the granules with a tablespoon. These are best made in a heavy-duty stand mixer.

This is a terrific recipe for preserving fresh cherries during their relatively short season. As they cook, their ruby red juices gush out and continue to deepen in color until they thicken to a flavorful syrup. Before folding them into ice cream, you’ll want to make sure they’re dry, since the liquid will muddy the ice cream. Drain the cherries in a strainer for at least 1 hour first, until they are sticky and dry (save the syrup for drizzling over ice cream). Then coarsely chop the cherries, or fold them into the ice cream whole as you remove it from the machine. Candied cherries are excellent on top of Lemon Sherbet (page 116) or Olive Oil Ice Cream (page 83), and on any homemade ice cream sundae you make as well.

These truffles will stay slightly soft in frozen ice cream. You can make them smaller or larger than indicated.

Croquant is French for “crunchy,” and this version certainly lives up to its name and reputation. This simple mix-in of toasted nuts enrobed in glossy caramel is wonderful when crushed and added to ice cream. You can crack it as fine, or as coarse, as you want. One tip: Adding the nuts to the caramel while they’re still warm will make them easier to mix.

This delicate but highly flavored brittle may lose its appealing crispness after it cools, so I recommend baking it just an hour or so before adding it to just-churned ice cream. I like it mixed into ice creams that are exotically flavored, such as Anise Ice Cream (page 36) or Lavender-Honey Ice Cream (page 64). Sesame seeds are very flavorful, and you’ll find that a small amount of this brittle will provide lots of flavor to any ice cream you chose to mix it into. Feel free to add a little freshly grated orange zest to the honey as well.

You don’t need me to tell you that Peanut Butter Patties are the best when embedded in any chocolate-flavored ice cream. Use a commercial brand of peanut butter when making these since natural-style peanut butter will make them too runny. If you want tinier pieces in your ice cream, simply shape the mixture into smaller patties. And although they’re rich, if you want more to add to your ice cream, it’s easy to double the recipe.

These mint disks are adapted from a recipe passed on to me by Elizabeth Falkner, the owner of San Francisco’s deservedly popular Citizen Cake bakery. The mixture is simple to put together, and you can adjust the mint flavor to your liking. Taste a bit and add more if you wish, as mint extracts and oils vary. I make my Peppermint Patties very minty, which is especially important when they’re crumbled into deep, dark chocolate ice cream, a combination I call “The Girl Scout Cookie Effect.”

If you take a bite of the finished Oatmeal Praline (which I don’t recommend, however tempting), you’ll find that it’s stubbornly hard. But don’t worry. Once you’ve smashed it into bits, folded it into your favorite ice cream, and left it in the freezer a bit, the pieces will soften up perfectly and become toothsome nuggets.

In spite of what you might see on television or read in cooking magazines, restaurant cooking is demanding, hectic work. Luckily, I baked professionally with Mary Jo Thoresen for many years, and although we worked really hard, we survived by finding humor in the craziest things, which would make no sense to anyone but us. We did everything from making up movie titles by substituting with the word “quince” in them (A Room with a Quince, Quince on a Hot Tin Roof, etc.) to writing a rap song about baking. At perhaps the depths of our silliness, we became obsessed with all things Scoopy, the clown on the box of ice cream cones you buy from the supermarket. Soon I started finding little pictures of him stuck in the oddest places in the pastry area where we worked. (I even discovered one on the windshield of my car one night after work.) Naturally, my nickname became Scoopy. Now that we’ve both become grown-ups, Mary Jo (aka Scary Jo) is the pastry chef at Jojo restaurant, which she co-owns, in Piedmont, California. Here’s her recipe for Peanut Brittle, which she crushes into brickly bits and adds to Vanilla Ice Cream (pages 24 and 25), dousing it with warm chocolate sauce for a wonderfully over-the-top peanut brittle sundae that should make sense to anyone. If you want to get creative, try mixing Peanut Brittle bits into Fresh Ginger Ice Cream (page 43) or Peanut Butter Ice Cream (page 50), and top it off with chocolate sauce as well. Whatever you mix it into, I’m sure you’ll find the result absolutely scoop-endous.

I was going to call these “Walnuts Gone Wild” but took a less seamy route and decided on simply Wet Walnuts. You can draw your own conclusions. But there’s nothing indecent about these maple-glazed walnuts, except how good they taste.

These easy-to-make peanuts will make you feel like a chocolatier assembling a world-class candy bar. If you’re anything like me, you can’t keep chocolate bars around the house without breaking off a hunk every time you pass by, so by all means double the recipe if you want, just to make sure there’s enough for folding into the ice cream later on.

This is one of my all-time favorite and most requested recipes. These nuts are lots of fun to make, and you’ll feel like a real candy maker as you triumphantly tilt your first batch out of the pan. Whole almonds get cooked in a syrup, simmering until the sugar crystallizes and clings to them, creating a crackly caramelized coating. This recipe can easily be doubled.

These cashews are simple to make and can be sprinkled over ice cream sundaes. Be sure to keep them in an airtight container at room temperature to keep them as crisp as possible.

I used to cringe every time someone would start a sentence with, “When I was your age…,” knowing that I was in for a lecture, heavy with nostalgia for days gone by. Nowadays, though, I find I’m doing the same a little too often for comfort. But it’s true, when I was younger (perhaps your age), my local ice cream parlor would serve, alongside their gloriously overloaded ice cream sundaes, little paper cups filled way up to the brim with buttered pecans roasted in real, honest-to-goodness butter, for just five cents. Five cents! Yikes! I think I’m becoming my parents.

There are really simple to make and will make you feel like an accomplished candy maker with minimal effort, and they’re very good too. I like these crunchy, salty peanuts liberally scattered all over the top of a towering hot fudge sundae. You’ll notice that I use raw peanuts, not ones that have been previously salted and roasted. If you wish, you can use unsalted preroasted peanuts (which, amusingly, are often called cocktail peanuts) and reduce the baking time to 15 minutes.