Ice Maple Cream with Berries

Being the good Canadian I am, I have a great fondness for maple syrup.  I would put it only one notch below honey on my sugar love scale (you're probably wondering how crazy I am). Yes, sugar love scale.  It's a thing, though I may have just made it up.  Maple syrup is incredibly expensive, I use it very sparingly, always with my oatmeal in the mornings and sometimes in the lattes I make, but I never skimp and buy the cheap stuff, it's just not worth it. This is how I feel about honey too, I buy local when it's available, the taste is always worth the extra dollars.  My sugar love scale looks something like this: honey, maple syrup, molasses, agave syrup and then the sugars.  (You'll never find me with things like aspartame, truvia or stevia in my cupboards!)

It is with great, indulgent pleasure that I bring you this dessert.  Now, I never thought about pairing maple syrup and summer berries, it didn't seem like the best idea.  But somehow it was! and the dessert works heavenly.  The maple cream was simple to put together and thankfully there was no ice cream maker required.  The downside to this of course, is that the cream only lasts around 24 hours before the quality starts to noticeably deteriorate, getting overly ice-y and hard.  Our batch was gone within 24 hours without any trouble!

Baking notes:
-I was short half an egg yolk, but it didn't seems to make too much of a difference.
-The recipe states that the yolk-maple syrup mixture will come to 175 F within 3 minutes or so of cooking over the double broiler, but after 20 minutes my mixture had only hit 165 F.  Finally I took it off, scraped it into a cold bowl and beat the mixture to cool down (it took about 5 minutes).  The ice cream turned out wonderfully.
-I used raspberries and strawberries that I froze from last summer, so they had broken down and were sweet and soft.

The recipe for Ice Maple Cream with Berries can be found on the epicurious website.

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