Hamptons Lane Subscription Box Review & Coupon – August 2016 Homemade Ice Cream Box

Hamptons Lane is a luxury monthly subscription box catering to cooking enthusiasts. Each month Hamptons Lane sends out themed recipes along with 4-7 curated artisanal ingredients and a kitchen tool that you can use to make delicious food at home. Once you sign up, each month you’ll receive an email describing that month’s new box. You can choose to skip that month without any penalty (no later than the fifth of the month), substitute another box for the current offering or, if need be, you can cancel at any time.

The theme for August was Homemade Ice Cream! The box arrived full of things to help you produce the ice cream flavor of your choosing: vanilla extract, peanut butter candy, strawberry jam and caramel.

The recipe book included gorgeous color photographs of all of the box’s ingredients along with directions for using  the enclosed ice cream maker and recipes that utilize it.

The Zoku Ice Cream Maker ($25.99) has a compact bowl which is great for home chefs with little freezer space. It’s also easy to use: simply place the inner bowl in the freezer for at least 12 hours. Once it has come to temperature, add in your ingredients and stir constantly for about 10 minutes. After ten minutes, you’ll have ice cream that’s roughly the consistency of soft serve. For those who desire more solid ice creams, simply place your soft serve in the freezer for an additional 10-20 minutes.

I found The Jam Stand’s Classic Strawberry Spread ($9.50) mildly disappointing. While good, I prefer Bonne Maman’s Strawberry Preserves (which is available in most grocery stores). The Jam Stand’s spread had a lot of acid and a relatively small amount of sugar. Since I’ve become accustomed to being blown away by Hamptons Lane’s condiment curation, I began to wonder whether this was featured because of how well it works in ice cream. I guess I’ll have to find out!

Frittle ($5.99) is a delicious peanut butter candy. Not too hard and not too soft, it’s slightly sweet and super yummy.

I loved CC Made’S Sel Gris Caramel ($5)! This was seriously the best caramel out of a jar I’ve ever had. I received CC Made’s chocolate caramel sauce in the Crêpes box, but I liked this version a lot more. Yum!

Madecasse’s Madagascar Vanilla ($6.49) is a delicious, rich and sweet vanilla. Produced in Madagascar and the United States from Madagascar vanilla beans, Madecasse’s founders plan to produce their vanilla and chocolate start to finish in Madagascar beginning next year.

This month Hamptons Lane enclosed a card advertising a number of additional tools and condiments that subscribers may be interested in to augment what they received in the homemade ice cream box. That hot fudge sounds great!

Here’s what I made this month:

I liked the ice cream with caramel with peanut butter candy very much! Hamptons Lane’s recipe began with a vanilla ice cream base which was delicious in its own right and then suggested mixing in CC Made’s sel gris caramel and frittle. Fantastic! As this was the first batch of ice cream I made with the Zoku, I was still getting a hang of it; I wasn’t quite sure what consistency to expect. I did better with the consistency of my strawberry ice cream.

For all of their recipes, Hamptons Lane states that you should expect the ice cream to come out of the Zoku looking like soft serve. I assume this is what they mean. They say that if you’d prefer your ice cream to be a little harder, you can put it back in the freezer for an additional 10-20 minutes. This consistency suited me just fine. I thought this strawberry ice cream was very rich, but I think I would have preferred using my regular go-to strawberry preserves for the recipe.

As always, I thought this installment from Hamptons Lane was a fun box that contained a number of delicious recipes. I thought the value was slightly higher than it has been the past few months, which was great. I also noticed that Hamptons Lane shied away from listing retail values of the enclosed products, which I think was a good move. Overall, I love Hamptons Lane! Their recipes are divine, and the suggested techniques and tools always make for nice date nights at home with my husband.

Do you subscribe to Hamptons Lane? What did you think of this month’s ice cream maker? If you haven’t, get $10 off your first box with coupon code hellosubscription10.

Visit Hamptons Lane to subscribe or find out more!