ornoth | Sweet Childhood Dreams

I’ve been talking about this project for maybe a year, and I finally got to it. I made a batch of ice cream where I replaced the normal amount of sugar with an equal amount of Pixy Stix candy.

Just think about the genius of that: Pixy Stix are pretty much just pure flavored sugar to begin with, so swapping it one-to-one for the sugar in an ice cream recipe ought to be pretty much a no-op. While at the same time, it makes something absolutely magical: Pixy Stix ice cream!

I actually upped the ante even more by adding crushed bits of SweeTart candies. Again, this is a bit more sleight-of-hand, because SweeTarts and Pixy Stix are exactly the same formula; the latter were created when parents wanted to give kids the same candy, but in a less messy form. So it was like Pixy Stix ice cream with Pixy Bitz! Did I say “genius” already?

So was the result just as magical as I’d envisioned?

Well, not really. See, the dextrose in Pixy Stix isn’t quite as sweet as normal sucrose, so the ice cream was actually a little bit bland. Not bad, mind you, but in no way sufficient to induce a diabetic seizure. Though the flavor did tend to come around as the ice cream hardened and “matured”.

And the SweeTart bits, of course, absorbed some of the moisture from the cream base and partially dissolved, which rendered them more chewy than crunchy. But they did leave a wonderfully colorful pattern in the base medium, looking for all the world like any confetti cake you’d make. They were actually a nice, festive addition to a surprisingly unmemorable base recipe.

But even if the results were mixed (hah!), it was still a very worthwhile experiment. Not all dreams turn out the way you envision them, but I’d rather have that than to never know and always wonder…

Watch on YouTube