Recipes: Three Things For An Ice Cream Maker

I’ve been debating buying an ice cream maker, but I don’t want to buy yet another pointless kitchen gadget that can only do one thing so a friend offered to lend me hers to see if I could come up with things I liked to eat. I thought I’d share the three things I attempted to make – I mean…it’s supposed to be summer, so we should be able to eat ice cream all the time, right?

First up – well, I had to do something with Nutella because I still have that huge jar of it in the cupboard. This recipe – well, it was so simple, I feel a bit silly calling it a recipe – only has two ingredients, and I already had both of them lurking in the cupboard. I used a can of condensed milk (which I bought to make some dulce du leche sauce for ice cream but hadn’t been bothered yet) and threw that into the ice cream maker, along with a few heaping tablespoons of Nutella (I only ate one myself).

It was super sweet, and needed a little extra freezing, but if you like that sort of sweetness, you’d love this.

This one is even less of a recipe than the Nutella one! So…fro yo. It’s awesome, right? Alex had gone away and left some of those yoghurt drinks in the fridge which I don’t like, so I thought I’d chuck them into the ice cream maker. In 10 minutes, I had fro yo. Pretty awesome, right? (Yeah, photos aren’t great in the evening in the kitchen!)

Finally, my favourite (no surprise there). I knew I wanted to try and make gin and tonic sorbet after hearing that the Ice Cream Farm sells it. Since I don’t live in Chester any more, it was unlikely I would be able to get some of this sorbet myself so I found a recipe on a blog (which I’ve lost the link to, damn!)

I made a sugar syrup by putting half a cup of sugar in with an equal amount of water into a saucepan and heating it gently until the sugar was dissolved. (Science!). Once it’s all dissolved, add in the juice of a large lime (which I replaced with lemon juice because I had lemon juice in the fridge) and let it cool. (I was super impatient, so I surrounded the jug with ice to cool it quicker!). Make yourself a gin and tonic, and then make another one for the sorbet (with about 3 shots of gin and two and a half cups of tonic). When the sugar syrup/juice mix is cool enough, mix with the gin and tonic and taste it. (Then taste it again, I mean, you don’t want this to be horrid) Pour into the ice cream maker and follow the instructions on your maker to make the sorbet. (You’ll be able to tell – it will get slushy at first then will be a bit harder.) If you’re not going to eat it straight away, pop it into the freezer to harden it up a bit more.

I think this will be perfect for BBQ’s in the summer…now I just need the good weather and a boyfriend at home for a few weekends!