My sister and I might hold the record for youngest dine-and-dashers. It’s probably not a proud title to have but oh well. We once bailed on the check at Friendly’s when I was no more 8 and she was maybe 4. I swear it’s not our fault, sorry Friendly’s, but it’s not like little kids carry around money.

No, I guess the actual dine-and-dash title would go to our grandparents. Because that night we sat in Friendly’s scraping the bottom of the metal sundae dishes that were once filled with black raspberry ice cream as we waited for the check. And waited.

It was super crowded and crazy, as most Friendly’s are at night when every student within a 5 mile radius is celebrating some random school event like a concert or play. But unlike a bunch of teenagers with endless amounts of time stretched out in front of them, my grandpa was not going to wait any longer. So in a haste we left. I don’t think anyone even noticed that we had left without settling the bill.

And I’m probably exaggerating the way these events played out but the Friendly’s incident has lived on in infamy between my sister and I. We even told the story at my grandpa’s surprise 80th birthday party last year. Everyone got up and shared nice memories and my sister and I in a fit of laughter proudly told of the time that we ran out on what was probably a twenty dollar check at Friendly’s. Memories!

I don’t even really eat black raspberry ice cream, I’m more of a strawberry girl, but I guess when you’re about to commit a crime you should change up your patterns. Also, when do you ever encounter black raspberries? Red raspberries, yes, all the time and blackberries all the time but I think my farmer’s market has had black raspberries three times and they were in tiny little containers that I hoarded for eating not for ice cream making.

I also don’t have an ice cream machine so my ice cream consumption was relegated to Talenti pints or other impulse buys when out. But then I saw a recipe for no-churn Birthday Cake ice cream from In Jennie’s Kitchen. She promised 5 ingredients and a bit of patience would get you ice cream, actual ice cream without an ice cream maker.

Alright my interest was piqued but I didn’t want birthday cake ice cream. I wanted something that used up the 9 million blackberries I can’t stop buying this time of year. And I wanted stuff in the blackberry ice cream because all the good ice creams have stuff, like cookie dough chunks or chocolate covered caramel pieces or birthday cake.

And then I remembered the most delicious dessert masquerading as a bread that I made a few summers ago, Blackberry Ricotta Cornbread from The Best Remedy. So I decided the stuff in my blackberry ice cream would be crumbles of cornbread. I usually like cornbread full of sugar but decided there was enough in the actual ice cream so I adapted the Pioneer Woman’s cornbread which is definitely on the savory side when it comes to cornbread.

Once you’ve done the hard work of picking your flavor and STUFF, the ice cream comes together pretty easy. If you’re going for a fruit flavor then you macerate your fruit of choice in a little sugar until the whole thing becomes syrupy. I bashed the fruit up with the back of a fork to help get things going and break the fruit down more.

Then the fruit gets bruised up even more by getting mixed up with sweetened condensed milk. You can certainly stir the two together in a much more gentler fashion by hand but I already had my stand mixer out for the whipped cream that makes up the rest of the ice cream base.

Try and tell me what dessert doesn’t benefit from freshly whipped cream! This blackberry ice cream is pretty much 50% whipped cream, how can that be a bad thing.

As aggressive you may be with making whipped cream or violently stirring together beaten up blackberries and sweetened condensed milk, please try to take it easy when combining the two. The whipped cream is the light airy component of the blackberry ice cream and you can’t dump it into the sweetened condensed milk without deflating it. So you add a little bit of whipped cream at a time to the purple bowl and GENTLY, gently fold the two together. I do it in thirds, add a little whipped cream, stir, add a few crumbles of cornbread, stir and repeat until the ingredients are a somewhat cohesive mixture.

At this point if you swipe your finger through the bowl everything will taste like a blackberry mousse. Yum, but not what we were going for. So use the patience that my grandpa didn’t have and cover the lid with parchment paper and a tight-fitting lid and let it live in the freezer overnight. When your bowl finally emerges from the freezer you will not have frozen whipped cream or a mousse, you will have blackberry ice cream studded with cornbread crumbles!