Ice Cream Summer Part I

This is planned as an on-going series because we are going to make home-made ice cream all summer!

After the success of last summer's brownie-filled chocolate chip cookie experiment, I decided to have an even bigger, more ambitious summer project for the kids and me: home-made ice cream! My challenge to the kids was to come up with their own flavors. Since school was in its final week, I did some practice runs to get us started.

First, I stuck with the simple vanilla ice cream recipe that came with our ice cream maker. It would easily fit in the One Ingredient Challenge because it has heavy cream, whole milk, granulated sugar, and vanilla extract. It was easy to make.

Simple ingredients for a simple dessert

Everything combined!

Finished product

It came out fine. The ice cream was not thick and creamy but tasted okay. The book has a "deluxe" recipe that uses eggs, we may try that in the future. My daughter made little sugar cookies the next day to take into school. She had some leftovers and we made tiny ice cream sandwiches.

Yum!

My second experiment was strawberry ice cream which was a little more involved than the vanilla recipe. First, I had to macerate the strawberries. Macerating is, essentially, extracting the juice from the fruit. This recipe had me mixing sliced strawberries, sugar, and some lemon juice to start the maceration process. After two hours, I had the juice the recipe recommended.

Stewing (metaphorically) in their own juice (literally)

The recipe follows the vanilla paradigm, using the strawberry juice instead of the vanilla. In the last five minutes of mixing, I added the sliced strawberries so they would mix nicely with the rest of the ice cream.

Ingredient Mark II

The barely perceptible pink tint from the juice

Adding the strawberries did not enhance the color

The results were mixed. The color was barely pink, which I am okay with since we didn't use artificial enhancements of any kind. The strawberries came out icy after the mix was in the freezer overnight. They were a little too large as chunks and a little too solid to scoop easily (though our freezer is set colder than is optimal for ice cream). I might chop them up more after maceration and see if that fixes the problem (or maybe macerate them longer?). 

I combined the vanilla and the strawberry ice cream to show the contrasting colors.

You can sort of tell which is vanilla and which strawberry, right?

The final experiment of the week had me splitting a vanilla ice cream batch into two so we could add ingredients. My daughter wanted to make "Sea Food" which is vanilla with blue dye, Swedish fish, and gummi sharks. The results looked good.

Two sets of ingredients

Making vanilla blue

Fish in a turbulent sea

The other half of the batch was mixed with peanut M&Ms (the plain ones were sold out at the store!) and Reese's Pieces. The hand mixing was good but it looked like most of the candies went to the bottom. After scooping, it did not look so bad.

Mixing in the candies

The Sea Food flavor had the same problem as the strawberry ice cream--the fish were frozen solid and hard to chew. Too bad our freezer has other stuff than ice cream in it, huh? Chopping the fish up might help, though then we'd have to call the flavor "Chum." Not too appetizing. By contrast, the M&Ms and Reese's Pieces were easy to chew up in the ice cream. Peanuts and peanut butter must have a lower freezing point.

The M&M/Reese's flavor was my favorite this week.

I am looking forward to the weeks ahead!