Home Made Iced Cream

Lovely soft cappuccino ice cream with no added, er, additives.

I use a one-litre carton of 35% cream, $6.99 at Foodland this week, but has dropped as low as $5.99 in the past six months.

I use plain white sugar, the sort I am not supposed to put in my tea and coffee. Sugar lowers the freezing-point of the cream and keeps it soft. Without the sugar you need to thaw rock-hard frozen cream before you can eat it. (On the other hand, if you are going on a bike-ride picnic, it won’t need thawing!)

I have a jar of instant coffee I bought when the Pharmacy had it on special a year ago; I use it only for cooking flavoring.

Into a steel bowl I drop two heaped teaspoons of instant coffee.

I pour in the litre of 35% cream.

I add four half-cups of sugar. Yes, this makes for a sweet iced-cream. I suggest that you start with four half-cups and then experiment with taste on subsequent batches.

I have learned to let this bowl stand for half an hour, giving the water from the cream and chance to invade the dried coffee. I think that this is called hydrogenation. Basically, give a chance for the coffee crystals to get wet and they will blend better into the cream.

It works. I use my electric beaters on high-speed for three minutes or so. Time will vary according to your beaters.

I have learned to set the bowl in the sink, as there is spatter (in small drops) at the early part of the process; the sink walls contain most of the spatter.

The mix arrives au point relatively suddenly, but you do not need to panic. It is not the speed at which crystals precipitate from a saturated solution.

In the photo above you can see that ridges of cream have formed and sit quite patiently waiting for me to finish beating around the bowl to sweep up peripheral cream that had until now escaped the beaters. That is a small margin of time to bring everything to a “peak”.

Don’t forget what Mum taught you: remove the beaters from the machine before licking them.

And here we are. A 1Kg margarine tub plus a smaller tub part-filled. This would serve six or eight guests quite handsomely. Not bad for about $7 and five minutes work, eh?

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