baker turns ice cream maker

it's too damn hot to bake these days. so even if i have cookie crumbs and cream cheese ready for a cheesecake, they still languish in my fridge uneaten.

thanks to the new fridge my sister bought last year from friends who migrated to the states, i can now easily make ice cream using a cuisinart ice cream & sorbet maker thingy my mom gave us some years ago. because the new fridge freezes things more efficiently, i can just store the little revolving freezy tub in the freezer and make sorbet or fruit slushies whenever i have orange juice on hand.

but i got tired of using the gadget in a half-assed way so i decided to make real ice cream. my first attempt was, of course, a disaster.

i got this chocolate ice cream recipe from epicurious.com that resulted in a sludge that was more pudding than custard. it almost wrecked the machine. it was just too thick to allow the paddle to rotate. so i tipped the sludge into a bowl and stirred in a cup of soymilk to thin it out. it froze into a dark and dense chocolate ice cream.

but because i have this bad habit of fiddling with a good thing, i almost mucked up half of the custard by pouring in a little too much mint extract. unfrozen, it tasted like chocolate mint toothpaste. but frozen, the flavors dulled a little and turned out perfect. am glad i'm the only one in my family who likes weird flavors so i have that all to myself.

i tried a new recipe the other night -- mocha chip ice cream. the recipe looks a little dodgy because there's no egg or cooking required. just lots of cream and milk, cocoa and instant coffee dumped into a bowl and whipped. some vanilla. and i substituted splenda for sugar.

the problem i think came from one tetrabrik of "cream" that some genius (me) had left in the freezer. it explicitly says DO NOT FREEZE on the outside of the tetrabrik packaging. i thought if i thawed it out, it would be okay. NOT. the water in it turns to ice and the milkfat sort of curdles weirdly between the little shards of ice. i couldn't very well whip a block of frozen dairy product into the other ingredients so i grated the mess into the sludge i was making. since the other ingredients were already chilled, the grated cream curds didn't melt or meld into the mixture.

still, it worked out in the end. it had to because splenda is expensive. a few minutes before the ice cream got churned properly, i tossed in some chopped ghirardhelli semisweet chocolate into the soft ice cream. so now i have mocha chip ice cream with little studs of cream in it.

yay.