Reddit reviews The Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments

Hooray! I love cookbooks!

• Forest Feast is great for those veggies & entertaining
  
  
• A subscription to Cook's Illustrated
  
  
• A solid cookbook - Smitten Kitchen
  
  
• Anything by Yotam Ottolenghi but I particularly LOVE Plenty.
  
  
• The god of pastry Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery
  
  
• David Chang's momofuku, his pastry chef Christina Tosi's milk bar,or a subscription to his magazine Lucky Peach
  
  I don't know if they're into making ice cream, but it's really easy and fun:
  Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream, The Perfect Scoop, and Ample Hills are all great.

I used an adapted version of David Lebovitz's recipe, which I found on Kitchen Confit. Basically it uses 4 oz of goat cheese instead of 8 oz. I think 4 oz is plenty goat cheese-y.

It's worth noting that the first time I made this, I overcooked the egg mixture and ended up with some sort of scrambled egg concoction. I was able to rescue it with an immersion blender.

Edit: The topping is something I made up. It's mostly honey, with a bit of butter and a tiny splash of vanilla. Unfortunately I don't have a recipe for it because I just played around with it on the stove until I liked what I saw/tasted/smelled.

• Le Creuset. Just one example - they have lots of nice gifts.
  
  
  
• Ice cream maker with recipe book and two stoneware bowls.
  
  
  
• Maybe they have a dark sky and enjoy stargazing? If so, a telescope
  
  
• In a rural area, they probably don't have access to high end grocery stores. A gourmet gift basket could be nice: Dean and Deluca; Harry & David; Vosges

The Perfect Scoop is by far the best ice cream book out there. I've made most recipes from that book and every one is delicious.

As far as ice cream makers go, I have the attachment for my Kitchenaid and it works great.

I love everything I've made out of The Perfect Scoop

I highly recommend that you buy "The Perfect Scoop" by David Lebovitz. (Amazon link here) It has a ton of amazing ice cream recipes, as well as recipes for sorbets, sherberts, frozen yogurts, toppings and mix-ins.

To get you started though, here's an ice-cream roundup from one of my favorite (and most reliably good) food blogs. Several of the recipes are from the book I recommended including the chocolate and vanilla, which are both amazingly good and a great place to start.

Ice-cream making is so much fun, and really easy - it's my favorite treat to make during the summer.

I have a few ice cream cookbooks that I love - you can probably find a handful of recipes from them via Google and food blogs.

David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. A lot of his recipes use an egg custard ice cream base - the recipes I've tried were delicious and really rich. He also has a lot of non-egg recipes and sorbets, plus recipes and suggestions for mix-ins. It's a good mix of more traditional flavors and some interesting/gourmet ones.

Jeni's book is another one that I've seen highly recommended. I've had it for awhile but just tried one of the recipes recently, and I loved it. Her recipes uses cornstarch instead of eggs, plus a few other tricks, and the recipe I made was REALLY good - perfect texture for scooping, and really tasty. Her recipes veer a little more towards the unusual, but there are some classics in there also and some sorbets, frozen yogurts, etc.