Baskin-Robbins Cherries Jubilee Ice Cream Recipe

Baskin-Robbins Cherries Jubilee is cherry ice cream with pieces of cherry and a hint of rum flavour, sold since 1964. This copy cooks quartered cherries in sugar, stirs the red syrup into cream and milk with a little rum extract, churns the mixture and folds the cherry pieces in at the end. It needs an ice cream maker and makes about five cups.

What Baskin-Robbins Cherries Jubilee is

Baskin-Robbins describes the flavour as cherry pieces in cherry ice cream with a subtle hint of rum flavour, a favourite since 1964, inspired by a dessert created for a British royal celebration in 1897.

That dessert is cherries jubilee: cherries and a liqueur, typically kirsch, flambéed and served as a sauce over vanilla ice cream. Wikipedia credits it to Auguste Escoffier, who is thought to have made it for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

The pint sold in grocery stores lists cream, sweetened diced cherries, nonfat milk, sugar and corn syrup, with colour from fruit and vegetable concentrates and no egg. The recipe below is a reconstruction from that list, and MakeFoodLovely is not connected with Baskin-Robbins.

Recipe

Cherries Jubilee Ice Cream

A reconstruction of Baskin-Robbins Cherries Jubilee — cherry ice cream made without eggs, with pieces of cherry cooked in sugar and a little rum extract. About 5 cups, eight servings.

5.0 (1)Print

Prep

20 min

Cook

10 min

Total

6 hr 55 min

Serves

8

Cuisine

American

Ingredients

• 12 ounces pitted sweet cherries, fresh or frozen
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon rum extract
• 1/8 teaspoon salt

Instructions

1. Cut the cherries into quarters. Put them in a saucepan with 1/2 cup of the sugar, bring to a simmer over medium heat and cook for 8 minutes, stirring, until the cherries are soft and sit in a dark red syrup.
2. Strain the syrup into a large bowl. Put the cherry pieces in a small container and refrigerate them.
3. Whisk the cream, the milk, the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar, the vanilla, the rum extract and the salt into the syrup until the sugar has dissolved. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
4. Churn the mixture in an ice cream maker until it looks like soft serve, 20 to 25 minutes.
5. Fold in the cold cherry pieces, pack the ice cream into a freezer container and freeze for at least 4 hours.

Nutrition

Calories:

320

Calculated from the ingredient quantities above using the USDA FoodData Central database, then divided by the number of servings. It is an estimate and will vary with the exact products you use.

Cherries that stay soft in the freezer

Raw cherries freeze into hard, icy lumps. Cooked in sugar first, they take up syrup, and sugar lowers the freezing point, so the pieces stay soft enough to bite.

• Quarters. A whole cherry is too large for a spoonful of ice cream.
• Frozen cherries are already pitted and need no thawing. Add 2 minutes to the cooking time.
• Dark sweet cherries give the deepest colour. The ice cream comes out pink from the syrup alone.

Rum flavour without rum

The flavour is described with a hint of rum flavour, and the copy uses rum extract: half a teaspoon for the whole batch.

With real rum, leave out the extract and add 1 tablespoon of dark rum to the base. Alcohol lowers the freezing point as well, so that version stays a little softer.

Without an ice cream maker

Cook the cherries with only 1/4 cup of sugar. Stir the strained syrup, the vanilla, the rum extract and the salt into one 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk, and leave out the milk and the rest of the sugar. Whip the 2 cups of cream to soft peaks, fold it in, then the cherry pieces, and freeze for 6 hours. The same shortcut works for the blue Cookie Monster ice cream.

Cherries jubilee, the dessert

For the dessert the flavour is named after, simmer 2 cups of pitted cherries with 1/4 cup of sugar and 2 tablespoons of kirsch or brandy for 5 minutes and spoon the warm sauce over vanilla ice cream. The classic version is set alight at the table; simmering does without the flame.

Other Baskin-Robbins flavours on this site are Love Potion #31, with raspberry and chocolate, and the Gold Medal Ribbon.