Unplugged Project - Smooth

For the last theme, "White", one of my Unplugged pals made homemade vanilla ice cream. Mmmm. I thought to myself, "One of these days I'll get the ice cream maker out of the basement, and E and I will make some ice cream." Imagine my delight when I read the theme for this week..."Smooth." Yay! What's smoother than creamy, homemade chocolate ice cream?

Finding a recipe was a bit of a challenge...I had some criteria to meet. First of all, no raw eggs in the recipe. Just, yuck. It doesn't matter if they're frozen, crystallized, whatever. I can't stomach that. Also, no pre-cooking of the ingredients. I wanted the process to be toddler friendly from beginning to end. So after a bunch of web searching, I found a recipe for basic vanilla ice cream (no eggs) flavored with chocolate syrup. E enjoyed the pouring and mixing, but her favorite part was licking the chocolate out of the measuring cup.

I must admit...all these years I thought it was the mixing that made the ice cream freeze. So on the first batch we poured the ingredients into the frozen canister and mixed and mixed and mixed. Much to my dismay, the very smooth concoction never made it past the milkshake stage. So we drank some out of our bowls, and put the rest in the freezer to solidify. Upon reading the directions (duh) I found out that you only need to turn the handle a few times, then you wait a few minutes for some of the mixture to freeze to the sides of the container. Only then do you turn the handle again...so of course we had to try the new method the next morning, this time with strawberry! And guess what...it worked! Perfect strawberry ice cream, delish.

The verdict? I thought the strawberry was great, and the chocolate was so-so. It looks good in the pic, but it tasted like vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce mixed in...go figure. E, M, and Baby m liked them both equally as well, and we will be doing this again soon. It's amazingly easy, really, if you can get over the price of fresh cream!