CHILLY BURGERS AND COOKIE DOUGHS ON COLD, RAINY DAYS

Think burger and what comes to mind is a huge, juicy beef burger with melted cheese oozing out of freshly baked bun as you bite into it.

But master sorbetero Ian Carandang, the brains and “muscles” behind the Sebastian’s Ice Cream brand of premium ice cream, has his own chilled version of it. He calls it Chilly Burger, and he has plenty of it in different flavors. Each Chilly Burger has a pair of cookies on both sides in place of the bread halves, squeezing in a huge scoop of ice cream. Chilly Burger has been Sebastians’ most popular frozen novelty.

Just recently, Ian introduced two new Chilly Burgers — Milo Chocolate Chip and Triple Nutella.

Since Milo has become one of Sebastians’ most popular flavors, Ian decided to turn it into the Milo Chocolate Chip Chilly Burger, which is made with Milo cookies garnished with chocolate chips, topped with Milo crumble, and filled with Milo ice cream.

For a lot of people, Nutella means love, so Ian made the Nutella-est Chillly Burger ever. This starts with the Nutella cookies, which contain chunks of Nutella-milk chocolate. The cookies are made to sandwich Nutella ice cream.

Since it has become a tradition for Sebastian’s to accompany each debuting Chilly Burger with a cookie dough version of it (cookie dough being the most popular flavor of regular ice cream which Sebastians sells in scoops), both new Chilly Burger variants come with cookie dough ice cream. This means an unbaked cookie dough version of the cookies used in the Chilly Burgers. The Milo Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough chops up unbaked Milo cookie dough and mixes it into the Milo ice cream. For the Triple Nutella Cookie Dough ice cream, unbaked Nutella cookie dough is frozen, chopped and folded into Nutella ice cream.

“We decided to do Chilly Burger and Cookie Dough as a pairing so you can enjoy Milo Chocolate Chip and Triple Nutella as both baked and unbaked,” says Ian, who creates all the flavors for Sebastian’s, which has a store at The Podium and is available online.

Sebastians has also just released three new ice cream flavors under its UK Flavour Collection. Inspired by Ian’s recent vacation in Manchester, United Kingdom, where he “discovered” all the wonderful British desserts available during his stay, the collection includes British Apple Crumble, Banoffee Pie and Sticky Toffee Pudding.

British Apple Crumble was inspired by the Humble Crumble shop in Camden Market. It starts off with a lush English custard ice cream made with lots of egg yolks and a hint of vanilla. The kitchen then bakes an oat crumble with pecans and walnuts as well as Granny Smith apples with spices and butter for a chunky apple ribbon. It all comes together in a classic British favorite in ice cream form.

Yes, banoffee pie is a British dessert, and Ian starts off his Banoffee Pie ice cream with an ice cream base made with fresh lakatan bananas sweetened with condensed milk. More sliced bananas are then added, plus a Graham crust crumble for texture. To finish, he adds in generous lashings of sweet dulce de leche made in-house.

As for the Sticky Toffee Pudding, it was inspired by Ian’s first taste of sticky toffee pudding in a pub in Manchester where he had a Sunday roast, and he was blown away by the sweet treat. So he baked a cake sweetened with dates, blended it into an ice cream base sweetened with toffee sauce. He then took some more cake and soaked it in toffee, which he froze, cut into chunks, and mixed into the ice cream. Afterwards, he made a traditional English Custard sauce and layered it on the ice cream for even more richness and a hint of vanilla.

And so Sebastians’ UK Flavour Collection is complete.