Yesterday my lovely friend Mariah and I made our own version of the famous and beloved Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream. We used the same simple ingredient proportions as the brown sugar peach ice cream I made a couple days ago - it was super easy, no cookbooks required!

Homemade Chunky Monkey Ice Cream

Ingredients
2 ripe bananas
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup whole milk
1 cup whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup halved walnuts
1/3 cup dark chocolate pieces*

Tools
Ice cream maker

Mash the bananas (peel first, please) in a bowl until they are a just little chunkier than a puree. Add the brown sugar and blend thoroughly. Add the milk, cream, and vanilla, and mix well. Pour into your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer's directions. After the mixture is partially frozen (around 10 minutes into the process), add walnuts and chocolate pieces (while the ice cream maker is still going) and allow the ice cream maker to run its course to complete the process.

Also note - for the chocolate pieces, we used Cote d'Or Orange for an added orange twist.

*For this recipe, we used untempered chocolate pieces. To make it, we melted the chocolate bars, poured the liquid chocolate onto parchment and spread it into a thin slab, stuck it in the freezer to harden, and then broke the untempered chocolate into pieces to add to the ice cream base. The reason we did it that way is that tempered chocolate is very hard at room temperature, and considerably more so when frozen. Untempered chocolate is much softer at room temperature, and when it's frozen, is about as hard as room temperature tempered chocolate. Chocolate pieces that are put into ice cream are often untempered so that they are a little less brittle in their frozen state.