Note: If you're reading this, don't take it as a sign that my city is no longer underwater; I've post-scheduled this post in anticipation of not having computer access.  There's still plenty to panic about. 

One of the pepper plants that Monica gifted me from the South Forty, was this Jamaican Hot Chocolate pepper plant.  These peppers are super yummy and very hot, with a unique flavor.  The KingofHearts claims it tastes like something burned, but I quite like them and maintain that he's just a wussy.

Plus, it's just fun to see a pepper turn a color other than red or green.


They ripen from the top down, so it's also kinda cool to watch.

There are only two problems with these plants.  One is they seem to be a determinate (if peppers can even be determinates, I don't even know).   Both years I've had these plants, they've produced five or six peppers which all ripen at once and then no more.  The second problem is they ripen slowly, so you have to wait until darn near the end of the season to savor their spicy goodness.  I have yet to figure out if that's to be expected, or if I'm just an incompetent farmer.

Either way, this was basically my yield from the Jamaican Hot Chocolate pepper crop here this year:


They're beautiful, aren't they?

Since there weren't enough to make salsa (at least not the way *I* make it), I decided to turn them into a new ice cream recipe.  And since the first spicy ice cream I ever tried was a spicy chocolate, well, they seemed to be calling out for it.

Honestly, there's not that much to it.  I basically followed my jalapeño ice cream recipe, (two peppers to three cups of milk plus 3/4 cup sugar).  You see more peppers here because I didn't want the peppers to go to waste and eventually doubled the recipe - before I doubled the milk I had basically made something that was so spicy it was pretty much inedible - even to me.


and then added a half cup of chocolate syrup when I put it in the ice cream maker.

I know.  Not a culinary accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination and Alice Waters would probably have my head for using Hershey's syrup rather than cocoa beans hand-picked by an Oompa Loompa riding on a llama who then gave them to a pilot set to jet them over to me within the hour, but,


still... pretty good.