ice cream

While out pursuing the elusive 2 foot by 4 foot folding table with adjustable legs at Target, Hubby and I found an ice cream maker on the clearance rack that is battery operated.  The ice cream maker holds between 6 and 12 ounces.  It is put out by Hamilton Beach and doesn't have very good reviews but what the heck it's kind of fun to play with until it goes kaput.

The first recipe I tried was from Leslie's blog, La Cocina De Leslie. I tried Paletas de Jamaica y Limon recipe with some variations, of course!  I used:

4 cups water
1 cup dried jamaica flowers (hibiscus flowers)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. stevia extract powder
1 tsp. dried quarter-cut ginger root
1 TBSP of lemon juice.

I brought the water to a boil.  Removed the water from the heat and stirred the jamaica flowers and ginger root, covered and let it steep for an hour or so.  Strained and then added the rest of the ingredients.  Stirred until the sugar was dissolved.  I chilled the syrup in the refrigerator until I was ready to make the sorbet.  The sorbet didn't freeze up very well and the paddle rode up in the freezer bowl.  After I broke up the ice that was building up on the bowl it froze a little better but we ended up sticking the freezer bowl back into the freezer and I whipped it a couple of times before we got the consistency we wanted.  Delicious!

Next up, I tried a recipe from the booklet that came with the ice cream maker with some changes, what else! Observation: why, if the capacity of the machine is 12 ounces, would you write the recipes in the booklet for twice that much?

1 cup half-n-half
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

I stirred everything up until the sugar was dissolved.  But this time I stuck the mixture in the freezer for about 30 minutes before I tried to make the ice cream.  Because I remembered reading that La Gringa from  La Gringa's Blogicito pre-froze her ice cream mix to get it to freeze in her climate.  I still scrape down the sides of the freezer bowl for the ice cream maker a couple of times to make sure all the frozen cream mix was being incorporated into the rest of the mixture.  I let it harden about 30 minutes in the freezer after churning. Very tasty!

The last go round I wanted to try making a non-dairy ice cream so I used Elana's recipe from Elana's Pantry as a starting point.

1 cup raw cashews
2 cups water
3/8 tsp. stevia extract powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 pinch salt

Soak the raw cashews in warm water for a couple of hours, drain and rinse.   Put everything in a blender and blend until creamy smooth.  This yields about 3 cups of cashew cream.  I measured out 12 ounces of the cream and put that back in the blender. Then added:

1 tablet of Abuelita's Mexican Chocolate, softened in the microwave

to the cream in the blender and gave it another whiz.  I pre-froze this batch also.  The mixture was very thick but not icy coming out of the freezer and I only had to scrap the sides of the freezer bowl once while making this batch and didn't have to harden it at all.  Excellent!

So, we will keep playing with our little gizmo until the motor craps out or the freezer bowl cracks and leaks all the blue-ice stuff out.

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Judy

* The photo is courtesy of the Hamilton Beach web site.