The Lee Bros. Bourbon Ball Ice Cream

In the Introduction to our first cookbook, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, we encouraged readers to be as creative and restless as we are in the kitchen, to invent their own variations on our recipes. In the two years since the book’s been published, we’ve been thrilled to hear about the riffs that cooks came up with when they took our advice to heart. One such example is Bourbon Ball Ice Cream, which takes our recipe for cayenne-spiked Bourbon Balls (those super-easy-to-make candies somewhere between a cookie and a truffle; pp 490-491) to a whole new level, allowing us to use them in a completely new way.

We owe this innovation to Scott Jones, the food editor of Southern Living. That magazine was running a story about a Christmas party we threw in Charleston, and they wanted to include our bourbon ball recipe in the article. The test-kitchen at Southern Living happened to be testing our recipe on the same day they were testing a vanilla ice cream recipe for another article. Jones, a C.I.A.-trained chef and an adventurous eater, happened to taste both recipes back-to-back and got an idea: he chopped up a bourbon ball, mixed it into the ice cream…Eureka!

Bourbon Ball Ice Cream kicks butt--similar to a Chocolate-Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream, but with drunken-holiday spice! And it’s super-easy: just quarter about 8 to 10 bourbon balls so you’ve got a cup of bourbon-ball pieces, and then fold them into a quart of softened vanilla ice cream so they’re evenly distributed throughout the ice cream. If you make your own vanilla ice cream, more power to you. But it’s just as easy to buy a quart of high-quality store-bought vanilla ice cream. Let the ice cream stand in its container outside the refrigerator to soften for ten minutes. Then scoop it from the carton into a bowl, add the bourbon ball pieces and fold them into the ice cream using a wooden spoon or rubber spatula. You can then serve it immediately, or pack the ice cream back into the pint and return it to the freezer until you’re ready to scoop.

Here’s our Hot-Spiced Bourbon Ball recipe. It makes about 30 bourbon balls, so freeze the leftovers in a tight-fitting container and use them for future batches of ice cream or defrost them to serve with after-dinner drinks.

If you have any variations on other recipes in our book that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear about them. Visit our cookbook website, www.mattleeandtedlee.com, to keep tabs on our cooking class and event schedule.