Subzero Temperatures and Ice Cream

The temperature around here hasn’t gone above zero degrees for days.  DAYS, People!  I’m freezing, and it makes just about any outdoor activity (including a walk to the mailbox) downright impossible.  Then Martin got an idea:

When life gives you ice… make ice cream.

Enter:

2 vanilla beans
1 pint cream
1 quart half and half
1 3/4 cup sugar

We scraped the vanilla beans while the other ingredients heated to 170 degrees (Farenheit) on the stove.  Then we mixed everything together and let it cool in the garage where the temperature was probably around 30 degrees.

This is where things got interesting.  I think my grandma announced, “Oh my word!”  We didn’t have an ice cream maker, and there was no way we were going to roll a tin can of the stuff around in the snow like in the old days.  I was still defrosting from the trip to the grocery store to get vanilla beans, and all I had to do there was walk across the parking lot!

Enter the KitchenAid mixer.

We put the mixer on the back porch, set it to low, and let it stir our ice cream for several hours until it resembled soft serve ice cream.

ice-cream-making-1

My mom and I fussed over the mixer at first.  I’ll admit it.  Two hours nonstop?  I didn’t see how a mixer could survive.  This is where Martin comes in.  He’s studying power electronics.  (Shhh… he had to explain his career to me, so don’t worry if you have no clue what I’m saying).  It’s engineering that focuses on motors and electronic thingies that work with them.  If you want to try making ice cream with your mixer like we did, the most important factor is that you keep your motor cold so it won’t overheat.  Needless to say, we had no problem keeping the motor cool around here.  And once the ice cream was like soft serve, we stuck it in the freezer to harden.

ice-cream-making

Call me crazy, but I was eating the stuff (with three sweaters on).

Finally, freezing weather paid off.