Project Coconut - Phase 2: Rum Raisin Coconut Ice Cream Sandwich with Chocolate Chip Coconut Cookies

Project Coconut Phase 2 was about rum raisin coconut ice cream sandwich with chocolate chip coconut cookies.

That was one of J's ideas when we were thinking about potentials of the fresh coconut meat. I made his idea materialize. First I needed to take the white meat out from the shell. I adapted David Lebovitz's "How to prepare fresh coconut." It wasn't a piece of cake job done in a second but manageable. And certainly it worked well!

Then, I ground the fresh meat in a food processor like this.

For the cookies, I toasted one cup of the ground coconut meat. It smelled very nice!

I adapted a recipe of Toasted Coconut Chocolate Chunk Cookies from Cooking Light with a few changes like replacing flaked sweeten coconut with homemade toasted fresh coconut and reducing brown sugar to 1/2 cup. I found out from the first batch, the cookie dough didn't spread out during baking. So for the second batch, I flatted each of the scooped cookie dough balls with palm so that the cookies would be thinner and wider, or more suitable for ice cream sandwiches. The result was beautiful nutty chocolatey cookies with light texture.

For the ice cream, I wanted to make smooth coconut ice cream since the cookies had chunky ground coconut texture. And I learned people make homemade coconut milk from fresh coconuts. Why not try it with my fresh ground coconut?

There were many websites that told me how to make homemade coconut milk. I tossed the rest of the ground fresh coconut in the blender with boiling water just enough to cover the coconut. I didn't measure the amount of water. Then, after mixing for 5 minutes, pour the mixture into a strainer layered with cheese cloth, drain the liquid and then tightly squeezed the liquid out. The liquid was my first homemade coconut milk from fresh coconut! It was about 1 cup. Unfortunately no pictures during this process. I wish I could show J the freshly squeezed coconut milk and my hard work.

To make the ice cream base, I adapted a recipe of Quick Coconut Ice Cream with Saffron by David Lebovitz again because the recipe called for palm sugar that I have been exploring. And it was egg-free. Plus, the recipe needed just 1 cup coconut milk. Perfect! I skipped saffron because rum raisin will be in my ice cream instead. I was very curious at the saffron scented ice cream, though. I soaked about 1 cup of raisin in rum for 3 days in the refrigerator and chopped them. I didn't add extra rum in the ice cream because I thought it might make ice cream too rummy and hide coconut flavor.

The ice cream was delightful. Rum and coconut were mingling together nicely. Palm sugar's gentle sweetness was complement to it. The texture was great too. Surprisingly it was always scoop-able even after a few days. The ice cream itself was wonderful, but between the incredible cookies was a marvelous idea.

On the other hand, there was the secondary product made after squeezing coconut milk. What can I do with it? To be continued.