Ice Cream

Three years ago, but maybe more, my friend Dennis gave me his ice cream maker on permanent loan. I moved it from DC to Milwaukee to Evanston without even opening the box.

This week, I decided to try making ice cream and opened the box. Yes, there was an ice cream maker in the box and no, there were no other surprises.

Making ice cream has never been on the short list of things I want to learn how to do in my life, but I like to experiment and this seemed like an opportunity.

I wanted just to see if I understood how the whole thing was going to work so I started with soy milk, since we have a lot of that in the house and added sugar and cocoa powder. It was okay. Nothing to write home about, but I now had enough confidence to try the real thing.

Last night, armed with whole milk, heavy whipping cream, sugar, unsweetened chocolate, eggs and vanilla, I made the base for real chocolate ice cream. I wasn't 100% sure what it was supposed to look like, but it looked like it would be pretty good.

This morning, after letting the mixture cool in the fridge over night, we poured it into the magic machine. Thirty minutes later - amazing chocolate ice cream. Very rich, and surprisingly excellent. In comparison, the first batch of ice cream - well, there is no comparison.

Tomorrow I'm going to try blueberry, or maybe a chocolate cinnamon. Thanks, Dennis!