I Scream! You Scream! We All Scream for Ice Cream!

So we love ice cream in our house. My dear husband often eats it every night (he use to barely eat it and then after an illness started eating it all the time). The other day at the store Hazel and I saw a small ice cream maker for around $10. We bought it since Hazel wanted to try to make ice cream.

Now as a child, I remember making ice cream with my family. It was a big ordeal and we always made it in the winter so we could use snow instead of ice to cool it. Of course our old ice cream maker made a good amount and it was huge. It was the size of a normal household bucket to clean with and had a huge crank on top. I don't remember how much ice cream it made, but it was enough to feed the five of us. Hazel's ice cream maker makes enough to feed the two of us, but we shared some with Daddy as well. Over the weekend we tried the recipe that came with the maker for vanilla ice cream. (I'll admit I questioned the small amount of sugar and vanilla, but figured the makers should know a good recipe--they didn't.)

Original Recipe Mixing

The recipe was to mix 1/2 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of cream, 1 teaspoon of sugar and a couple of drops of vanilla in a bowl and put it in the refrigerator for an hour. Then prepare the drum of the mixer with 5 ounces of salt, 1/2 cup of cold water and fill the rest with ice. Set up maker and then pour three-quarters of your mixture in and turn and turn and turn. Once it begins to form ice cream pour remaining mixture in. Well we did all of this and it tasted like frozen milk. Not very delicious. Oh, well.

New Recipe Mixing

So I searched the internet for a better recipe. I found several recipes, but this one on All Recipes was closest to our failed one and All Recipes was nice enough to have a button to scale it to the same amount of milk and cream as the original. So we used 1/2 cup of milk (fat free since that is what we have), 1/2 cup heavy cream, 3 tablespoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanilla. Then we put it in the refrigerator. We mixed it yesterday and then got too busy to finish it, so we finished it today.

Hazel helped me today prepare the maker. We measured the 5 ounces of salt and then she added the 1/2 cup of cold water. Then we added the ice cubes. She had fun adding these.

Then we closed the drum and put it in the machine and put the top and scaper on the machine. Then we poured 3/4 of the mixture in and Hazel started to turn and turn.

After a little while she got bored turning, so I took over. Then I added the last part of the mixture and then we started to get ice cream! And this time it actually tasted good!

Ok, I know there have been many posts about making ice cream in a plastic bag. I found a link at About.com with the instructions as well as a good explanation of the science behind it. Teachnet.com has a similar post but also includes the history of who founded ice cream. And for a little fun here is an ice cream flavor personality quiz. Science News For Kids offers some books to check out on ice cream. I'm going to check them out from our library. Science News For Kids also has an interesting article talking about the nutritional values of ice cream, etc. and has percentages of favorite flavors and a link to a word find.

So what is your favorite flavor? Mine has always been strawberry.


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