My housemate Aoife bought the wrong cream for her cake. She needed whipping cream and had accidentally bought 600 grams of ‘extra thick cream’.
I don’t usually cook with cream of any kind. I wondered if it could somehow be turned into ice cream. So I bought some frozen berries and milk.
It wasn’t until I searched for ‘how to make ice cream’ on the internet did I realise that ice cream is more complicated than I thought. Depending on the recipe, you have to cook it, whip it, use egg yolks, use milk powder… In the end, my brain couldn’t handle it so I decided to ‘cook with my gut’. (This coming from a girl who feels guilty about varying recipes slightly.)
I put the 600 grams of extra thick cream and the 400 grams of frozen berries into a blender. Then, because I felt like it, I added around 100 mL milk and two tablespoons of sugar.
It blended nicely on the ‘ice cubes’ setting then the ‘milkshake’ setting. On tasting, I found it wasn’t quite sweet enough. So I added two tablespoons of cherry jam.
Blend, blend, blend.
The flavour was perfect. Just like my favourite berry yoghurts but more fatty.
It’s now in the freezer. I stirred it a bit after two hours and found it was getting firm around the edge of the box without going icy.
I am hopeful this will turn out well. The end product may bring to mind frozen yoghurt rather than an ice cream, but maybe that’s because yoghurt is where we usually experience these berry flavours.
Nutritional information (per regular 50 gram scoop): 158kcal, 15g fat, 9.6g saturated fat, 5.3g carbohydrates, 4.5g sugar, 0.9g protein, 14mg sodium
Wow! This is 50% more calorific than normal ice cream.
Semi-bad news. It became hard, the way frozen food is hard. It’s possible to scrape off creamy berriness and once you get going, you quickly build up a snow — it gets easier.
Still, it’s hard to get a 50 gram scoop of ice cream. This may be a way to ration my servings, a blessing in disguise.
That’s what ice cream makers are meant to solve, with the constant churning, right?
In any case, when I made ice cream I think I had to mix it every 30 mins for 5 hours. That might be why I never made ice cream again 😉
Some things are just not worth it, eh. I think Damjan tried to make fruit juice at home and it turned out to be more expensive than buying it from a juice bar. Economies of scale seem to have delivered in this case.
Of course, home made is generally tastier and if friends want to make banana and chocolate muffins, I am there!