When you are planning a birthday party for children, it is common to serve vanilla ice cream and whipped cream to accompany the birthday cake. Though you can buy and serve commercially produced vanilla ice cream and whipped cream at a grocery store, it can often contain unwanted preservatives and artificial food coloring. One solution is to make your own vanilla ice cream and whipped cream using only natural ingredients.
Place the ice cream maker barrel into a plastic bag, and put it into a freezer for six hours. Place the frozen barrel into the ice cream maker. Pour 1 cup of heavy cream and 1 cup of whole milk into the frozen ice cream maker barrel.
Add in 1 cup of granulated sugar and 1 tsp. of vanilla extract. Turn on the ice cream maker, and allow it to run for 20 minutes. The ingredients will be transformed into vanilla ice cream. Pour 1 cup of heavy cream and 1/2 cup of powdered sugar into a bowl. Beat the cream and sugar with an electric mixer for 30 minutes to transform it into whipped cream.
Making ice cream at home requires no special equipment, gives you free rein in combining flavors and impresses the socks off dinner guests. What's your favorite recipe?
Don't know much about international diplomacy, but I do have a sneaking suspicion that it probably doesn't make enough use of ice cream. There's something innocently joyful about the stuff – how can anyone be angry when holding a double cone with a flake on top? If James Bond has never disarmed a baddy with a then it can only be because of the difficulties of safely transporting a 99 in a Seville Row suit.
Ice cream is too light-hearted a foodstuff for snobbery – even the much-derided can raise a smile on a hot day – but it is worth making yourself, for two reasons.
The first is that, as yet, even the pushes supermarkets don't tend to stock the esoteric flavor combinations that characterize the modern ice, which is a pity, because Waitrose could make a killing with my plum & Earl Grey. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, people tend to be really, really impressed when you serve homemade ice cream.
Before you can go mad with the anchovy palate cleansers, however, it's important to master some basic principles. Hesston Blumenthal, a self-professed 'ice cream fanatic', explains that all ice creams are made of five key ingredients: ice crystals, fat, sugar, air and 'other solids', including the proteins and minerals contained in the milk.
Most will also include an emulsifier, such as xanthenes gum (in the case of mass-produced ice cream) or egg yolk, in more traditional recipes. Only the simplest, 'Philadelphia-style' ices, which are really just flavored creams, scorn such luxuries.