Scooped: Pumpkin Brownie Chunk Ice Cream

[Photograph: Max Falkowitz]

I don't care how old you are: Halloween should never stop being awesome.   When you're a kid, it's easy. Candy. Costumes. Staying out late while rocking a sugar high. Whispering incantations to keep your mom from stealing the Almond Joy. (What, you didn't?)   As we get older, Halloween should get more fun, not less. Parties. Pumpkin beer. The realization that you can buy as much of your favorite candy as you want without any social stigma. Halloween becomes the holiday that embraces our younger selves as well as our mischievous adult natures. Not to get all anthropological or anything, but we need a little pagan bacchanalia. Halloween fits the bill and then some. It has pumpkins.

I'm not the biggest pumpkin fan, but on Halloween I go nuts. It's a ritual food for the holiday, plus it absolves the aforementioned stigma of downing a pound of pumpkin fudge in one sitting. But more than fudge, even more than pie, I think pumpkin's true calling is ice cream. Frozen custard turns the heavy and starchy into the creamy and ethereal. Pumpkin ice cream sweetens you up without weighing you down.   That would be all well and good, and this is a lovely pumpkin ice cream on its own, but it doesn't shout Halloween like it should. Enter dark (almost black), chunks of fudgy brownie. Even when when frozen they stay soft and retain their rich chew. Pumpkin and chocolate together isn't always the easiest sell, but try this. It's the frozen candy bar that never was, that should have been.

This Halloween, while sipping on pumpkin beer and watching The Nightmare Before Christmas, I will be downing a bowl of this stuff. The trick or treaters will have to make do with Reese's. They'll live.

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Pumpkin Brownie Chunk Ice Cream »