Pumpkin Pie...Vegan Ice Cream?

I was completely unaware of the fact that, somewhere deep in the bowels of our slightly cluttered basement, lay an ice cream maker.
I had considered getting myself one as a birthday present (perhaps I could've disguised it as a present for my sister), imagining all the delicious vegan ice cream I could make. Trader Joe's has a good solid chocolate soy ice cream, but just chocolate, even with peanut butter sauce or cocoa powder dusted on top, gets a little boring. Ideas popped into my head as I sat in the cole in Zaragoza...chai, lemon basil, chocolate peanut butter, chili chocolate or peanut butter curry, salted caramel...and then I read the NYTimes article about a specialty ice cream shop in San Francisco and even more fantasies danced into my brain: bourbon cornflake, salt and pepper, carrot mango...and then my sister asked me, "Wanna make ice cream?"
"We have an ice cream maker?!" came my astonished reply.
Turns out, we did. And my sister pulled a box of vegan MimicCreme out of the fridge. MimicCreme is a cashew- and almond-based vegan cream substitute that works surprisingly well. Our first recipe was simple: 1 cup frozen strawberries blended with 1 cup sweentened heavy "cream" and churned for 20 minutes before an overnight freeze. It was good, but didn't have quite enough flavor or body for me.
So when I was looking up vegan ice cream recipes on Hannah Kaminsky's blog, a flavor I hadn't even considered stopped me in my tracks: pumpkin pie ice cream.
As a child, I never liked pumpkin pie. It seemed cold and slimy and squash-y - I loved my vegetables, but you could keep them out of my desserts. However, this fall in Spain, my friends' pining for pumpkin pie inspired me to make one from scratch in my host mother's kitchen. And I realized that I loved the warmly spiced pie, even when it involved boiling the pumpkin and mashing the fruit by hand! (Pumpkin pie perhaps sounds more appealing to the 5-year-old me when pumpkin is called by its true botanical classification, a fruit.) After searching all over Zaragoza for dried and powdered ginger, the pie was rewardingly delicious.

My American pie in Spain. ahhh, seeing her plates makes me miss my host mother! These were probably the most colorful thing in her apartment...

So I fell in love with an American food in Spain, and so I reinvented it as a summer dessert.
The recipe is another easy one, but yields a soft and smooth ice cream that fills the mouth with flavor from the first bite to the last. The pumpkin's earthy flavor comes first, followed by a sweet spiciness, the cinnamon and ginger blending with the brown sugar. As you dig your next spoonful, it's as though you've just had a bite of pumpkin pie...but you didn't need to have Thanksgiving as an excuse, and the oven stayed turned off.
The perfect summer reincarnation of pumpkin pie!!
Here's the recipe:

Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream

1 15-ounce can of pure pumpkin purée
the now-empty pumpkin can filled to half-an-inch below the top with sweentened MimicCreme (the original recipe called for a 14-ounce can of coconut milk)
3/4 cup, more or less, brown sugar
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
1/2 teaspoon salt

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender or food processor until smooth.
2. Chill ingredients if not already cool.
3. Freeze and churn in ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions.
4. Transfer to an airtight container and freeze for a few hours until scoopable.