… Then I went to the store anyway to get the more rare ingredients I obviously needed.

Royalberry ice-cream was actually pretty easy to make. In Birth By Sleep it calls for 7 Gaspberries, 10 Nebula Nectars, 8 Birthday Cakes, and 7 Rose Honeys. It was described as “a raspberry ice-cream with a hint of sour hiding under all that sweet.” This actually made the fantasy ingredients pretty easy to convert. Gaspberries were obviously raspberries and rose honey is an actual real thing, no conversion needed. Birthday cake I interpreted as cake mix in order to make a cake flavored ice-cream, which left me with Nebula Nectar. The only nectar flavored ice-cream I ever had was flavored with agave nectar, which is in fact a little bit sour and a lot sweet. I started with a basic recipe for cake flavored ice-cream and went from there.

Ingredients

• 1 cup whole milk
• ½ cup granulated sugar
• ¼ cup rose honey
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ½ teaspoon raspberry extract
• 1 teaspoon agave nectar
• 2/3 cup cake mix
• Fresh raspberries

Directions

1. In a medium bowl, whisk milk, sugar, and honey together until well combined
2. Stir in heavy cream, vanilla extract, raspberry extract, and agave nectar. Adjust extracts to taste depending on how sour or sweet you like it.
3. Stir in cake mix, make sure there are no lumps.
4. Pour mixture into ice-cream maker and let it thicken.
5. Store in the freezer.

Verdict

Well, if this ice-cream is anything, it’s faithful to the cannon. It’s a very sweet raspberry cake ice-cream that is only made sweeter by the honey and agave nectar. The recipe originally called for 3/4^th of a cup of sugar but I replaced that with the rose honey (rather than simply adding on) to cut the sweetness a little. This made the cream thicken a bit slower but not to the degree that it ruined the recipe.

In the end, the ice-cream wasn’t really my thing, but I can see its appeal. Like I said before it was VERY sweet, and almost all that sweetness came from fruit and honey. So if you have a sweet tooth and like really fruity ice-cream, then this is the ice-cream for you. It’s a well-made recipe, it’s just not something I’d personally get at Baskin Robins any time soon. I prefer smoothness to sweetness.

This review was particularly fun to do, once I realized the game was so short. It’s the Square-Enix version of dangling a tuna in front of a hungry cat.

Continuing on my epic quest to make all 15 flavors of ice-cream in Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep in real life, we have recipe number 2, Snow Bear ice-cream.

In the game, Snow Bear ice-cream is made by 3 Open Sesames and 5 Soy Milks. Simple enough, all I really needed to do was make a soy based sesame ice-cream. However, it’s effect is to put you go into the Diamond Dust command style, an ice-based command style, so I actually wanted to find a soy ice-cream recipe that created a lot of ice-crystals upon freezing. I originally found a recipe that used mostly egg yolks and soy-milk, but then I found this handy site which not only had the proper English names of the Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep ice-cream (apparently Volcano Curry is actually named Bueno Volcano in English, but the picture looks chocolaty so I feel redeemed in a small way) but also descriptions of each ice-cream product as well. The Snow-Bear ice-cream called it “a healthy, tofu-flavored ice cream shaped just like a polar bear” so I had to ditch this recipe and use a tofu based soy vegan ice-cream recipe instead.

… this got a little complicated. Then I realized that tofu based ice-cream is easy as hell to make, and it got a whole lot less complicated.

Side Note: This recipe is totally vegan friendly!

Snow Bear Ice-Cream Recipe

What You Will Need

Blender
Ice-Cream Maker or Bear Shaped Ice Pop Molds + Popsicle Sticks

Ingredients

1 1/2 Cup Soy Milk
1 12oz. Box Soft Silken Tofu (do not drain the tofu or use low fat tofu)
6 Tablespoons Crushed Roasted Black Sesame Seeds
2 Teaspoons Vanilla Extract
2 Tablespoons Vegetable Oil
6 Tablespoons Sugar or 1/3 Cup Maple Syrup

Instructions

1. Put everything in a blender. Blend until smooth.
2. Put into ice-cream maker, or bear shaped ice-pop molds.
3. Play some more Kingdom Hearts as you wait for it to freeze.
4. Eat!

Verdict:

The hardest thing about Snow Bear ice-cream, was getting the consistency right. I actually never made tofu based ice cream before, so I had to futz a lot with the amount of soy milk I put in. I’m not entirely sure that one and a half cups is the sweet spot but it was somewhere between one and two cups. So start with one cup and add more if it’s too thick. Just be careful not to make it too thin.

That being said, I don’t know if you’ve ever had black sesame ice-cream before but it’s amazing. It’s actually one of my favorite flavors. I’ve never had tofu based ice-cream before, but the best way I can describe it is halfway between frozen yogurt and pudding. Other than the weird texture, I have to say it tasted pretty good. I’d probably go with a more traditional frozen custard recipe for my black sesame ice-cream in the future, but if you want the authentic Kingdom Hearts experience, it has to be tofu based.

For the record, I used sugar as my sweetener and an ice-cream machine to freeze my ice-cream. I haven’t actually tried it with maple syrup, but a lot of recipes online, as well as some vegetarian friends of mine, tell me that it not only tastes better as a sweetener than plain old sugar, but it also makes the ice-cream smoother. I’m not entirely sure if the ice-pop molds will work, but given enough time they should. Tofu ice-cream does in fact freeze solid so I don’t see why it wouldn’t. I just prefer to eat my ice-cream in a bowl rather than on a pop.

Also, you might have a hard time finding pre-roasted, pre-crushed black sesame seeds. If that is the case, you can get normal black sesame seeds, and roast them yourself. Simply pre-heat a pan over medium-high heat, and then put the seeds in. Stir as they roast, but don’t let them burn. It won’t take very long so just try to judge. Once they are roasted, put them in your blender before anything else, and blend them until they are crushed. There ya go! Instant roasted and crushed black sesame seeds.

If you are really obsessive compulsive and want your snow bear ice-cream to look EXACTLY like the picture from Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, then I would suggest making my recipe above, and this recipe for tofu chocolate ice-cream as well. You can put the chocolate in the areas of the bear mold that are brown, the sesame in the areas that are white, and use chocolate pieces or licorice or something for the eyes and nose.

Anyway, I actually liked this more than I liked the Volcano Curry … sorry … Bueno Volcano recipe, becuase I like smooth creamy nutty ice-creams more than I like spicy or chocolate based ice-creams. However, I also think that vanilla is superior to chocolate in every way, so that’s mostly a matter of taste. I also like that it’s a lot harder for a sesame flavor to be overpowering, as opposed to say a dark spicy chocolate flavor. Overall, I would say this was a success.

Tune in next time when I kill your taste buds with the unfathomably sour taste of Spark Lemon ice-cream.

So this gave me the great idea to go on a culinary adventure in making all 15 ice-cream recipes from Birth By Sleep, and posting the results here as I do. Now you can make all your favorite Birth by Sleep ice-cream recipes in real life.

What’s that you say? You didn’t know there were different types of ice-cream in Birth by Sleep? Well join the club. Actually, I beat the entire game without realizing that you could make ice-cream in Toon Town. For those of you who don’t know, ice-cream is a consumable item that automatically puts you into a certain command style in the game. It’s supposedly really powerful, and loading up on ice-cream is apparently one way to get through the higher difficulties of the game … at least according to the forums I read. To make ice cream, you have to find the ingredients for the flavor you want and bring them to Huey Duck. So it’s a powerful game mechanic wrapped up in a fetch quest. It’s easy to see why a lot of people pass this part up.

However, I am more interested in the actual flavors of ice cream than the in-game benefits they give you. As such, I am working off of the recipe list found at gamefaqs.com. I will be doing my best to translate the ingredients as best I can into a real life recipe, while at the same time making the damn thing taste good. So up first, we have Volcano Curry.

Volcano Curry Ice Cream Recipe

In Birth By Sleep, Volcano Curry Ice-Cream puts you into the fire command style, so naturally the ice-cream itself would be a spicy flavor. Now, I have had two types of spicy ice-cream before, spiced chocolate, and mango curry ice-cream. Unfortunately, the ingredients for the ice-cream in the game are five pixy peppers, and three toon curries. Peppers are a key ingredient in spicy chocolate ice-cream, and curry powder is a key ingredient in … well any curry based ice-cream but the two don’t really mix. As such, I had three choices. I could make a spiced-chocolate ice-cream and add some curry, a curry fruit ice-cream and add some peppers, or omit both the chocolate and the fruit and just see how spicy curry chili pepper ice-cream would turn out.

Well, I made a tiny batch of pre-freeze ice-cream with all three recipes in mind, and had mixed results. The plain old spicy ice-cream was interesting but wasn’t really a flavor I wanted to have again. The fruit with chili ice-cream was a strange combination that actually kind of weirded me out, so I scrapped that one. The spicy chocolate curry ice-cream recipe, however, was pretty good, Chocolate and curry actually go together (you would know this if you watched Kuroshitsuji season 1) and I was actually impressed at how well both flavors mix together. So I decided that Volcano Curry ice-cream was a flavor of chocolate, and here is the recipe I used.

What you will need:

Large bowl
Saucepan
Wooden spoon
Wire whisk or electric mixer
Ice-cream maker or ice pop molds

3 cups half-and-half
1 jalapeño chile, stemmed, seeded, and julienned
10 ounces bitter sweet chocolate, finely chopped
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons yellow curry powder
3 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup crumbled dark chocolate bits or dark chocolate chips

Instructions:

1. Put the half-and-half, Jalapeno, cinnamon, and curry powder in a saucepan and heat over medium-high heat, stirring constnatly until it just about boils. Do not let the mixture over-boil as it will burn the half-and-half. Use a wooden spoon, not a metal one, as metal spoons will scratch your pot and make it more likely that the half-and-half will burn.
2. Immediately remove from heat and add the bitter sweet chocolate. Let it sit for about 2 minutes and stir until the chocolate is melted and incorporated into the mixture.
3. Let it cool. Cover the pot and refrigerate overnight.
4. Strain the mixture, discarding the jalapeno.
5. In a large bowl, combine the eggs and sugar. Beat until fluffy and light in color. An electric mixer is good for this.
6. Combine the egg mixture with the chocolate mixture. Stir well.
7. Add the heavy cream. Stir well again.
8. Put the entire mixture into an ice-cream maker, adding the dark chocolate chips or bits. Make some ice-cream!
9. (Alternative) Put the mixture into ice-pop molds and freeze overnight. If you do this, do not add the chocolate chips or bits.

Verdict:

Are you a chocolate fan? I hope so because this is about as chocolate as chocolate gets. For those of you who have never had spiced chocolate ice-cream before, here is a short run down. Adding spice to chocolate actually makes that chocolate taste darker. As a result, the combination of cinnamon and spicy pepper makes this recipe taste exceedingly dark. The curry powder balances out this darkness, believe it or not, with a sight smooth taste. Overall, I liked it. I’m actually not a big chocolate lover, but the flavor was more than serviceable.

If I were to think of condiments to add to this, I would probably choose something like white chocolate sauce, or bits, or marshmallow fluff. Nuts in syrup would help too. The ice-cream tastes so much of chocolate and spice, a lighter flavor helps balance the whole package.

A lot of people are going to say I cheated on this one … and since it’s my first one I can’t say I was off to a good start. I suppose the most “authentic” flavor would omit the chocolate all together, but it’s also very clear in the game that there are ingredients used in the ice-cream that aren’t gathered by you specifically. Now, I’ve had curry flavored ice-cream before, and I suppose I could attempt to make just an exceedingly spicy curry flavor, but I doubt my ability to do it with any sort of success. However, if enough fans want me to try this, I’ll go out and give it a shot.

Up next, Snow Bear ice-cream, which strangely enough will be totally vegan friendly.

*picture used property of Shiroi Kamaitachi

Cut to about a week ago. Friend and fellow DO XIII member Mike was having his birthday celebration. Considering that he had access to liquid nitrogen (don’t ask how, but two goats, a baseball bat, and a waffle wrapped in plastic were involved) he figured, what better way to celebrate being one year closer to death than to make ice-cream using the liquid nitrogen and the overwhelming power of SCIENCE!!! All party-goers were able to pick one flavor of ice-cream they wanted to make and of course me, fresh off my cry fest from repeatedly watching the ending of 358/2 days. decoded that mine would be the favorite of Nobodies everywhere, sea salt flavor.

Now liquid nitrogen based sea-salt ice-cream is the GEEKIEST ICE-CREAM YOU CAN MAKE. It uses an obscure science based ice-cream making method to make a flavor prominently featured in a video game. Awesome! Most of the recipes on the internet didn’t actually appeal to me, so instead I used my own favorite custard base and tweaked the recipe myself. The result was phenomenal. The sea salt ice-cream we made was described by Rob to be “far too awesome.” We totally understood why Roxas had this every day. Trust me, it was amazing.

Now what sort of people would we be if we didn’t share this recipe with you. Just follow these simple steps and you too will be able to make your own sea salt ice-cream, betray your friends, get trapped in a virtual reality town, and eventually cease to exist … well you will be able to at least make the ice-cream.

THE SUPER DELUXE TOTALLY AWESOME OFFICIAL DISORGANIZATION XIII SEA SALT ICE CREAM RECIPE!

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

EQUIPMENT

• Wire whisk or fork
• Wooden spoon
• Medium sized saucepan
• Medium sized bowl
• 1 cup measure
• 1 teaspoon measure
• Ice-cream maker or ice-pop molds or a cooler of liquid nitrogen (optional)
• 1 heart (optional … get it)

INGREDIENTS

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• sea-salt
• blue and green food coloring (optional)

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Re-arrange the letters of your name and add an X somewhere.
2. Crack 2 eggs into the bowl and whisk well for a few minutes. A wire whisk works best but a fork can do in a pinch.
3. Add the cup of sugar into the eggs and continue to whisk well until creamy.
4. Heat the milk in the saucepan over medium heat until warmish hot while constantly stirring with the wooden spoon (do not use a metal spoon it will scratch your pot and make the milk burn easier). The milk should be right before boiling, but do not let it boil. Do not heat too fast or the milk will curdle. Whole milk works best and makes the creamiest and most delicious ice cream, however any milk will do in a pinch (I actually used 2%) and if you are watching your weight feel free to use skim.
5. Add the egg and sugar mixture into the warm milk and heat over medium to low heat until thickened. This will take a while and the mixture may boil a bit. If it does reduce your heat to low (to prevent further boiling) and keep stirring until it has the consistency of very thin pudding. If you want a slightly richer ice cream, add a couple more sprinklings of sugar to this step.
6. Remove the saucepan from the heat and stick it in the fridge to cool.
7. Once your mixture has cooled to room temperature or below, take it out of the fridge and add the heavy cream and vanilla. People who want a slightly richer ice-cream may want to add a little more vanilla than usual.
8. Add sea-salt slowly and taste until you have a slightly salty but sweet flavor to your liking. I like my sea-salt ice cream very salty and put a little under a teaspoon of salt in. Some people like less, some people like more.
9. (Optional) Add the food coloring. To get the traditional kingdom hearts color, I used 10 drops of blue and 2 drops of green.

This is your ice cream, except the only problem is, it’s not iced yet. To get it nice and cold and frosty you will use one of four methods.

THE ICE POP METHOD

This is the simplest method, and it results in sea salt ice cream pops much like you see in Kingdom Hearts 2 and 358/2 days. Simply pour your mixture into your ice-pop molds and put the molds into your freezer. When they are fully frozen you will have ice cold sea salt ice cream pops ready to be taken to your nearest clock tower.

THE ICE CREAM MAKER METHOD

This method results in hard ice-cream much the consistency of what you would find in a local Edy’s tub. Simply turn the ice cream maker on and pour your concoction in and let it run from 1-2 hours. You will have to wait longer than normal for sea salt ice-cream to freeze because the salt lowers the freezing temperature. After it has thickened, place it in a storage container and put it in the freezer to freeze.

THE LIQUID NITROGEN METHOD

This method is possibly dangerous and we don’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have experience dealing with liquid nitrogen, supervision, and a friend to help. Basically, pour the liquid nitrogen directly into your ice cream mixture very slowly bit by bit while stirring constantly. Your ice cream will thicken gradually as the liquid nitrogen burns off. Do NOT let the liquid nitrogen come in contact with skin or get on any hair or cloth or carpet. Any liquid nitrogen that gets caught in a skin crevice or hair or something could cause third degree burns. Handle it with the same caution you would use when dealing with hot boiling oil in a fryer. However, if you succeed you will have the creamiest soft serve ice cream you will have ever tasted.

THE GHETTO FABULOUS WAY

If you have none of these other options available to you, simply put the mixture in a container and stick it in the freezer. This basically creates a brick of ice cream, way harder than any of the other methods, but it still tastes good and you can scrape it out and put it in a bowl all the same.

There! Now you have all you need to go and make your own sea salt ice-cream. Make a batch right away and share it with your friends … except for Demyx … Demyx is a tool.

(First two images are copyright Square-Enix. Last image is copyright Meru-Chan from Deviantart. Check out her stuff, she is awesome!)