Homemade Ice-cream

We have been having fun with my latest toy - an ice-cream maker.  It was a birthday present and a big surprise.
For years (and I do mean four or five) I have been asking for an ice-cream maker for birthdays and Christmas to no avail.  It had got to the stage where it was:
"What do you want for your birthday?" 
"Well, I would ask for an ice-cream maker but there is no point as I won't get one!"
But now here it is a Proline IMC15 with its own freezer so all you have to do it bung everything in a wait for 60 minutes to have home-made icecream.

Now if your family is anything like mine everybody wants their own flavour so we have had a trip to the store to get some containers and have made two different flavours so far - Chocolate Chip and Banana and Almond.


Apologises that the measurements are in cups - this is what came with the machine!  Of course you could use the recipe without an ice-cream maker - pour into a freezer container and whisk the mixture at intervals to break up the ice crystals as it freezes.


Chocolate Chip Ice-cream (Makes eight 1/2 cup servings)
This was originally supposed to be plain vanilla as our first foray into homemade ice-cream but when we had added all the cream etc. to the maker I discovered that the vanilla essence had not been unpacked yet! We saved the situation by adding a bar of chocolate chopped up to make our own chocolate chips.

1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups double cream
1 bar chocolate chopped

Mix together the milk and sugar in a bowl until the sugar has dissolved.  Add the other ingredients and throw it all into the ice-cream maker.  Turn on and wait to see what happens.  At this point it was impossible to get close as there where three small heads all crowded around the machine.  The mixture, which looked nowhere near enough at the start of the session, began to expand as it froze and looked like it was about to climb out of the bowl!  We held our nerve (and our breathe) and it stopped just at the top of the bucket.
The verdict- well it goes to show that commercial ice-cream doesn't really have that much cream in it!  This was very rich; next time we will have to adjust the proportion of cream to milk (or maybe add some yogurt instead of some of the cream).  Oh and having found the vanilla I am definitely going to add a few drops next time as well as the chocolate chips, sometimes a little thing can make a lot of difference!


Banana and Almond Ice-cream (makes eight 1/2 cup servings)

2 bananas, mashed
1/2 cup almonds, chopped
1 cup milk
1 cup double cream
1/2 cup sugar
3-4 drops vanilla essence

Stir everything together and pour into the ice-cream maker.
60 minutes later this is what we had. Yep at the top of the maker again!

The milk to cream balance was much better this time, much less fatty tasting. It was also very bananary (is that even a word - well you know what I mean!) so could maybe stand 1 banana not 2.  The almonds had a hard time competing against the bananas so maybe a little more of them next time. Oh and to make it perfect some toffee or caramel sauce - yum!