Pistachio Ice Cream and an Ice Cream Birthday Cake, How Emotions are Made

It is getting to be late August and summer 2025 is fading away. The one summery thing I wanted to do this year before the season ended was to make ice cream at home. My kids love ice cream and my parents love ice cream too. While the grandparents were visiting, my daughter made a ritual of eating a small serving of ice cream with them every night at 9 pm. It was their special time together. We went through so much ice cream this summer- all of it store-bought. 

Meanwhile, my ice cream maker has been sitting on a shelf untouched for years. I also own a great ice cream recipe book that I've flipped through but never used- Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer. It was published in 2011 and given to me by a dear friend before we left St. Louis the following year. It has clung to my kitchen bookshelf through many rounds of cookbook decluttering. Last weekend, I cracked open the book and looked for a recipe to try, for real this time.

Jeni's is a famous ice cream store that started in Ohio and now has branches all over, including one close to our house. It is very good ice cream, and the last time I ate a lavender ice cream there that I still dream about. 

The two things that stand out about Jeni's ice cream- the texture and the flavors. Unlike most ice creams, it is made without eggs. Instead, the custard is thickened with a bit of cream cheese and a thickener like cornstarch, making the ice cream smooth and creamy without being overly airy. Jeni's is known for its wacky flavors. There are very few standard flavor recipes in the cookbook. Instead what she shares are elevated versions of classic flavors, and a plethora of ice cream recipes with unusual ingredients such as peanut, celery, goat cheese, earl grey tea, sweet corn...

I knew just the recipe I wanted, though, the roasted pistachio ice cream. Pistachio is my very favorite ice cream/ gelato flavor, and it is quite difficult to find good versions of this flavor. Often, what you get is a lot of green food coloring and a strong taste of almond extract. I was diligent in following Jeni's recipe very closely- it looked like exactly what I was looking for in this flavor. There's nothing difficult about the recipe, but there are a number of steps and some require precise timing. The ingredients are all common ones that can be found in practically any supermarket. If you want to glance at the recipe, it has been posted on some blogs, like here and here. 

First, the flavor mixture. I used store-bought roasted pistachios and ground them to a smooth paste in the food processor. This takes quite a bit longer than you would think, and I added a couple of drops of oil to help it along at some point. The pistachio paste is mixed into softened cream cheese and a touch of salt. 

Second, make a ice water bath by filling a large bowl with some ice and water.

Third, the custard made by boiling together milk, cream, sugar and a bit of light corn syrup, thickening the custard with cornstarch. 

The custard is whisked into the pistachio mixture. Then, I placed the bowl into the ice bath to cool a bath (I preferred this method to the one in the book, which recommended pouring the custard into a ziploc bag to cool), followed by refrigerating for a few hours to get it very cold. 

Finally, I added the cold ice cream mixture to the ice cream maker bowl (with a few drops of almond extract for flavor) and spun it into soft serve, then transferred to a container to freeze solid. 

I was overjoyed with the results, to say the least. This is the best ice cream I've made in my life and probably the best pistachio ice cream I've ever eaten. It is a beautiful, doable recipe that any home cook can use with excellent results. Like I said before, it is not an airy ice cream but with a dense texture, like kulfi or gelato. It has almost a savory quality and is not cloying in its sweetness. 

Another surprise (given the modest quantity of ingredients) was that a batch of ice cream is quite generous and makes 10-12 servings, as this is a rich ice cream and very satisfying in small quantities. 

I served the ice cream when we had friends for dinner. None of them are particular fans of pistachio ice cream, but every single person, child and adult, ended up loving it. I know I will make this again and again. 

It would be fun to add cardamom or saffron or rose water instead of almond extract to switch up the flavors and really take it down the kulfi route. There are a couple of other recipes I want to try from this book, especially the salted caramel ice cream (V's favorite flavor) and the roasted strawberry one (too bad berry season is over). 

Other ice cream (or adjacent) recipe on OHS- I had completely forgotten about these until I did a search for this post: Pistachio kulfi, Cardamom rose kulfi, Fig walnut kulfi, No-cook strawberry ice cream, Tender coconut ice cream. 

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My son celebrated his ninth birthday over summer, and in the weeks before, we considered a few ideas for his homemade birthday cake. He had decided on a candy cake, the kind where you bake a round chocolate cake, surround it with a border of individual kit kat bar sticks, and load it with M&Ms. You will see this all over Pinterest and such. To me, it honestly sounds awful and over-sweet with all that candy, but on par with what a nine year old would love, and I agreed to it.

But at the last minute,- and much to my relief, I will confess- he changed his mind and requested an ice cream cake instead, with three specific flavors- vanilla ice cream, mango sorbet and raspberry sorbet. I bought all of these at the store and used a tube cake pan as the mold to assemble the cake, softening one flavor at a time and layering them in. 

When it was time to serve the cake, I pulled it out of the mold and topped the cake with a few flourishes of whipped cream and some maraschino cherries. The combination of flavors worked beautifully and all in all, this was an easy and tasty birthday cake, much enjoyed by all. 

* * * 

Here are some recent recommendations from my bedtime reading--

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck (published in 2011) is an amusing and very readable novella that touches on themes of horror and existentialism. It is inspired by the famous 1941 story “The Library of Babel” by Borges. This story describes an infinite library made up of hexagonal rooms, each containing shelves of books that are filled with every possible combination of letters, punctuation, and spaces. Thus it contains every book ever written or that could be written, but these books are randomly hidden among infinite nonsense in the library of Babel. 

The premise of A Short Stay in Hell is that a man dies and is sent to hell, and hell is basically the library of Babel. The book describes the narrator's existence in this hell, an infinite library filled with unreadable books, and how he copes. Written in simple language and without any overt gruesome themes, this novel nevertheless filled me with existential dread. If you're looking for a short and off-beat read, I highly recommend this book. 

The library had a book display of bestsellers from the 1990s. This is where I picked up this short but powerful book- Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (published in 1996), a non-fiction account of a famous missing person mystery. Krakauer is a gifted author of narrative non-fiction. His other book, Into Thin Air, is one of the only books that I've ever stayed up half the night to finish. (I love reading but I love sleep more; however, this book was an irresistible page-turner for me.) 

Anyway, Into the Wild tells the story of a young man who rejected the norms of affluent society in which he grew up, and was endlessly enamored by the idea of living in the wilderness. He decided to spend a summer living off the land in Alaska, an adventure that had fatal consequences for him. The book does a deep dive into the life of this person's life, and also narrates stories of the lives of other people like him, who were irresistibly drawn to undertake adventures in inhospitable wild locations. The author feels a special kinship with his subject as he himself was a young man with a strained relationship with his father and a penchant for crazy (in his case, mountaineering) adventures. This sort of book is surreal for me (whose adventures extend only as far as challenging recipes) and a glimpse into a different world. I highly recommend this book if you want to immerse yourself into a fascinating story. 

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A few posts ago, I summarized a book called Being You. This book mentioned another book on new theories of how the brain creates emotions- How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett (published in 2017). I knew I had to look for it. 

So many times- especially during busy periods like this summer when I was pulled in different directions- I feel like emotions get the best of me. Too much of the damn day is spent being pushed around by emotional upsets- mine and everyone else's. I am a prime candidate for learning more about emotions and getting some pointers for better emotional regulation. 

The book is a very interesting one, written by a psychologist and with a neuroscience approach. I don't know enough about the field to review the book critically, but the author presented several intriguing ideas and I'll try to summarize them here. The book centers around a emerging theory of emotions that is different from the classical view:

• There is a classical, time-honored view of emotions as universal, built-in reflexes that come on quickly and automatically. 
• However, there is abundant evidence that in fact emotions are not built in, that they vary from culture to culture, and that our brains create them.
• This is the "theory of constructed emotion". Emotions are real, but not in the way molecules and neurons are real. They are real in the same way that money is real- hardly an illusion, but a product of human agreement. 
  

How the brain works: Brain activity is not reactive, lying dormant until stimulated. Intrinsic brain activity continues from birth until death. Intrinsic brain activity is millions and millions of nonstop predictions. (Intrinsic networks are considered one of neuroscience’s great discoveries of the past decade.)

The brain is entombed in a dark box and can only make predictions based on scraps of information plus past experiences. Prediction is such a fundamental activity of the human brain that some scientists consider it the brain’s primary mode of operation. The brain is always predicting and its most important mission is predicting your body’s energy needs so you can stay alive and well. The author calls this the body budget.

Your body budgeting regions make predictions to estimate the resources to keep you alive and flourishing, using past experiences as a guide.

• You spend resources to move, run your organs
• You replenish resources by eating, drinking, sleeping
• You reduce your body’s spending by relaxing

Withdrawals from the body budget don’t require actual physical movement. If you see a family member or co-worker walking towards you and you believe they judge everything you say or do, your brain predicts that your body needs energy and makes a budget withdrawal, releasing cortisol and flooding glucose into your bloodstream. Any event that significantly impacts your body budget becomes personally meaningful to you. 

Where do feelings come from? There is an ongoing process inside us called interoception- the brain’s representation of everything going on inside us, such as noticing thirst, feeling hunger or fullness, or sensing a racing heartbeat. We experience interoception as a general sense of feeling called affect. In everyday use, the word “affect” (verb) means “to influence”, like, “The weather affects my mood”. But in psychology, the term affect (noun, pronounced AH-fect) has a very specific meaning. 

Affect (simpler than emotion) is the general sense of feeling that we experience throughout the day, made up of two features

• Valence: how pleasant or unpleasant you feel- sun on your skin, taste of food, discomfort of a stomachache
• Arousal: how calm or agitated you feel- jittery/excited or weary/low-energy

Affect is a fundamental feature of consciousness, like brightness or loudness. Affect is a simple summary of your budgetary state. Why we experience interoception as affect is a great mystery of science. 

Anyway, usually we experience interoception only in general terms of affect- pleasure, displeasure, arousal, calmness. Sometimes, however, we experience moments of intense interoceptive sensations as emotions. 

How do sensations turn into emotions? The brain’s job is to predict sensory signals before they arrive, fill in missing details, find regularities when possible, so that you can experience a world of objects, people, music, and events, and not the blooming, buzzing confusion that is really out there- to achieve this amazing feat, the brain employs concepts. When your brain needs a concept, it constructs one on the fly, mixing and matching from a population of instances from your past experience, to best fit your goals in a particular situation, and herein lies a key to how emotions are made. 

At one time (say, waiting for an old friend at the airport), you can experience a host of emotions (happiness about seeing them, nervousness about whether you will still feel connected, anxiety about driving back in the dark), your brain weighs all sensations and makes predictions using concepts, and the most probable prediction becomes your perception. Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are our constructions of the world. 

The two main ingredients that the author suggests for improving emotional regulation are related to body budget and concepts.

• If you maintain a balanced body budget, you feel better in general. This is difficult to do because everything is modern culture is designed to mess up the body budget. The main things are obvious and well-known lifestyle factors: eat healthfully, exercise regularly and vigorously (yoga is especially good), get enough sleep, spend time in nature, perform mental excursions (books and movies), engage in hobbies, practice giving and gratitude
• If you develop a rich set of concepts, you’ll have a toolbox for a meaningful life. Become more emotionally intelligent- collect experiences and perspectives, improve your emotional granularity (words and categories for emotions), keep track of positive experiences and focus on those, write about your experiences.

With your kids, be a tour guide. Talk about what causes emotions and what are the consequences to others. Your detailed explanations help your children build a well-developed conceptual system for emotion. In general, children with richer conceptual systems for emotion are poised for greater academic success.

Other tips from the author:

• Recategorize your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions as physical sensations. 
• Cultivate and experience awe to get some distance from the self- develop an awe-inspired concept of being enveloped within nature and feeling like a tiny speck to take comfort in your insignificance. 
• When you feel bad, treat yourself like you have a virus rather than assuming that your unpleasant feelings mean something personal.

Perceiving emotion intelligently in people around you: Let go of assumptions that emotions have classic fingerprints that you can detect. You cannot know how others feel, they are just guesses. If you want someone to know what you’re feeling, you need to transmit clear cues for the other person to predict effectively and for synchrony to occur. 

The author speculates about the link between emotions and illness, both physical and mental. One interesting connection she makes- Anxiety sufferers, for whatever reason, have weakened connections between several key hubs in the interoceptive network, including the amygdala, which likely translate into an anxious brain that is clumsy at crafting predictions to match the immediate circumstances, and that fails to learn effectively from experience. You might predict threats needlessly, or create uncertainty by predicting imprecisely or not at all. Very intriguing. 

Overall, this is a very interesting book and I am glad I read it. It did give me some important insights into improving emotional regulation and why it gets so difficult during stressful times.

If you make ice cream at home, do you have a favorite recipe? What have you been reading this week? How do you cope with emotional regulation ;)?