holytoastr | (no subject)

I did not sleep well last night, so I took a mental health day today. It has been a good day so far. I did a bit of cleaning, mended some clothes, and cuddled my dog. It would be better if ben was here to enjoy it with me, but other than that, I have no regrets for skipping work today.

Yesterday, I made ice cream. I enjoy making ice cream. It is easy to do and ends up delicious. (Most of the time.) I would like to start up an ice cream club around here but I don't really know how. I may start bringing ice cream into work to make them my guinea pigs for new flavors.

It always surprises me just how easy it is to make ice cream. My favorite step is making the custard. The warm custard always makes the kitchen smell delicious.

The custard is made from whole milk, heavy cream, egg yolks, sugar, and a pinch of salt. The trickiest part is tempering the eggs before you add them to the mixture so they don't cook. After that, it's just a lot of stirring while getting really hungry from the delicious smell.

Once the custard is thick enough, which is easy to tell because it thickly coats the spoon, the whole thing gets dumped through a strainer into a bowl filled with ice cold cream. I like to use a metal bowl placed inside a bowl of ice water to make it extra cold. That way the cooking of the custard stops instantly. The strainer is just to remove any bits of custard that may have accidentally cooked too much. I like to do it that way so I don't have to stress about the custard being perfect.

This is also the step where I added peppermint extract. And vodka. Peppermint extract already has alcohol in it, so I didn't need to add a lot of vodka this time. A few teaspoons of vodka in homemade ice cream is the difference between a delicious frozen treat and a frozen rock.

After that, it needed to cool down completely. I am impatient so I put the custard in ice water bowl in the fridge for about 2 hours. The ice water is key in speeding up the chilling process.

But once it's cold enough, it goes right into the mixer!

It makes me crazy watching it spin and spin and spin, so I usually walk away and come back later 15 minutes to add any goodies.

In this case, the goodies were chocolate chips.

The end result of the churning process has the consistency of soft serve. It is always horribly tempting. But I was good and packed it all away to harden overnight. (And then licked the spatula and mixing bowl instead.)

In the morning, I had beautiful, delicious ice cream!

I think it looks pretty professional. And it tasted pretty good too. Since I used heavy cream, it tastes like the fancy expensive gourmet ice cream that's all over the place these days.