Home made Ice cream for breakfast

[kareina]

archinonlive has been saying that he wants an ice cream maker since I moved in (possibly longer than that, but I have no data points from then). On Friday the local store that sometimes carries the one he'd decided he wanted finally had one in stock, so he brought it home after work. So we put the freezing part into the freezer and took off to visit his parents, who live about an hour south of here.

They have a lovely home, which the family built themselves, and archinonlive did the drawing of the plans. They live on the shore near the town of Piteå on a lovely forested block of land. The near by homes are only summer homes, so it is nice and quiet there. They have a variety of buildings on their property. The main house consists of a a huge living room which fades into kitchen on one end, their bedroom, and a large bathroom complete with a large whirl-pool style bathtub. The second house is used as his mother's office for her business--it has a room that is her dedicated office, a small area that looks like a living room, but is now contains the desk for her employee, a bathroom and sauna, and upstairs are four small bedrooms all equipped with bunk beds, most of which are double bed on the bottom, single on the top. This comes in handy when their kids and their partners are home because there are five of them, three of whom have children (no that isn't enough rooms for everyone when they all gather, but the motor home is also a good sleeping space and it doesn't happen so often that they are all home at once since three of them live down south).

We stayed over on Friday and I am pleased to report that while I am still a long way off of speaking Swedish, I was able to understand far more of the conversation than even a couple of weeks ago when they visited us. We borrowed a stack of children's books for me to read and continue learning.

Saturday afternoon was gaming, so we didn't get to try out the ice cream maker till Saturday evening rather late. Needless to say by the time it was made it was too late for me to be eating, so as soon as I finished my bowl of museli this morning I had to try some. For the first batch we made a point of trying to follow one of the recipes that came with the machine, just to see how it comes out so that we will know what to tweak next time to make it better. Even so I think the result is much better than store-bought ice cream.

Just for my records here is a description of what we did and how it came out.

The recipe book that came with the maker gives measurements in grams (a very UK and Australian thing to do), but archinonlive doesn't own a scale because Sweden (like the US) uses recipes with measurements by volume (but they use deciliters instead of cups). Therefore there was a slight delay while we consulted the internet to find out how much sugar is in a gram.

The measurements we used:

Vanilla Ice Cream attempt #1

2 egg yolks
1 whole egg
1/2 cup sugar (but that cup measure also measures in dl, so that is probably a metric cup)
1 teaspoon vanilla sugar
1 teaspoon cornstartch (or corn flour if you speak Australian)
4 dl milk
1.5 dl cream
0.5 dl extra cream

The instructions said to use an electric mixer on the egg yolks, sugar, cornstartch and vanilla sugar, but the whole egg was never mentioned anywhere in the instructions. Therefore we decided to put it in at that step, just to see what happened (we did pause to check the internet, but found no recipes that included a whole egg at all). We were then instructed to gently heat the milk before gradually adding it to the egg mixture, so we microwaved it. We didn't see the cream mentioned, so we decided to add it (the 1.5 dls of it) then (without preheating it. We then heated the milk, eggs, sugar, etc. on the stove for a few minutes, string constantly. The instructions then said to cool it to refrigerator temp, so we put a lid on the pot and set it outside in the snow while we made a fruit salad. When we checked the recipe again we noticed that we were meant to gently fold in the cream after chilling the mix, so we added an additional 0.5 dl at this point and put it into the machine. We couldn't find anything in the manual or recipe book that clearly said how to tell when the ice cream was done, so when, after about an hour of running, it didn't look like it was getting any thicker we called it good and poured the still gooey, but nice and cold, mix into an icecream bucket and put it into the freezer. After yoga (about 30 minutes later) we checked it, gave it a good stir, and put it back--it was thickening up and freezing nicely. This morning I enjoyed a small bowl full for second breakfast, and pronounced the texture wonderful, and the flavour nice. It would be better I think with less sugar, but then I don't have a sweet tooth.

Edited to add: for the purposes of my food log, the above amounts convert to 5% protein, 84% dairy, 0.01% starch, and 10% junk by volume (where eggs = "protein" and sugar = "junk").

Now it is time to go to fighter training where, hopefully, I will be active enough to justify such a high-energy breakfast.

Comments

[merlyn-gabriel.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you are really happy! Are you now based permanently in Sweden?

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I would like to be--there remains some amount of paperwork with respect to visa applications before I get to use the word permanent...

[mushroom-maiden.livejournal.com]

Hi Reia! Just wanted to comment and say I love you and I miss you and I enjoy reading your posts even if I don't comment much, and I think of you often :)

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I love you and miss you, too, and hope that everything is going well with you.