Peach Ice Cream with Agave Nectar

In an effort to cut out sugar in my diet I've been using more agave nectar in sweet treats. Thanks to my wonderful mother-in-law, I got the kitchen aid ice cream making attachment for my birthday so I'm now able to make ice cream at home. We've tried a couple recipes so far that I've found on the internet. A double chocolate one that was ok and an apricot one that came out more like sorbet than ice cream. I wanted to use some of the fabulous peaches I've been getting from the farmer's market to make peach ice cream. So I bugged my brother for the recipe he uses from the Ben and Jerry's ice cream book. I made some modifications to use the agave nectar and incorporate his suggestion that we incorporate some alcohol in order to make it a bit softer. It came out pretty great, still missing something, but we'll have to experiment a bit further. But it's still tasty. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients

• 2 cups peaches, finely chopped. I peeled mine
• 1/3 cup raw sugar or cane juice crystals
• 6 tbsp agave nectar
  
• 1 tbsp lemon juice (either freshly squeezed or from a bottle)
• 1 tbsp dark rum
• 2 large eggs (or 3 sm-med ones that I get from my CSA)
• 2 cups cream
• 1 cup milk

Directions

1. Combine the peaches,1/3 cup raw sugar, lemon juice , and the rum in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, stirring the mixture every 30 minutes (I just did this occasionally)
2. Remove the peaches from the refrigerator and drain the juice into another bowl. Return the peaches to the refrigerator. Whisk the eggs until light and fluffy, 1-2 minutes.
3. Whisk in the agave nectar, a little at a time, then continue whisking until completely blended, about 1 minute more. Pour in the cream and milk and whisk to blend. Add the peach juice and blend.
4. Transfer the mixture to an ice cream maker and freeze following manufacturer's instructions.
5. Optional: Our ice cream maker doesn't do chuncks very well, so I pureed the peaches in my food processor.
6. Halfway through the process, add in the peaches.
7. Freeze until the ice cream is the desired texture.
8. Enjoy!

This was yummy. Things we will think about adding next time: Sherry or marsala wine instead of rum, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, caramom. All in all I like the ice cream with agave nectar. I've cut the sugar from the original recipe, I've found I don't need as much, it tastes plenty sweet. We've found that it (and the agave) helps with the I want another bowl immediately syndrome. I can have my one small bowl and be done. We also use local milk (hartzler's this time) and cream (snowville creamery), eggs (from our CSA) and peaches.

Hopefully this will be the start of me posting more regularly.