Misadventures in Ice Cream Making
Jul. 12th, 2013 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelOK. So there was another food truck rally in town tonight and we weren't very hungry so the most excellent spouse and I went with the sole goal of scoring some ice cream from the wacky people at Treat Dreams. So we get there and for once they still have all the featured flavors available. My husband wanted the Orange Clove sorbet, which is nice enough but I wanted some ice cream. He pointed out that they had Lavender Ginger. I pointed out that it was vegan Lavender Ginger, and at that point I'd half-decided to go with the blue-tinted cookie dough, but when we got to the counter I asked what was in the vegan stuff. The ice cream dude said it was made with rice milk, and since I've had rice-based ice cream before that was perfectly tasty I was willing to give it a shot.
Big mistake. This "ice cream" was more like a fluffy sherbet or even a fine-grained Hawaiian shaved ice. It tasted very faintly of lavender and ginger. I can handle some pretty intense levels of both lavender and ginger so this experience was underwhelming in the extreme. I ended up swapping with my husband, and let me say that after trying the vegan Lavender Ginger that Orange Clove sorbet was delicious- and, despite being completely non-dairy and not pretending to be otherwise, far more creamy and pleasing in texture than the rice cream.
Normally I'd retaliate against such an experience by whipping up my own batch of lavender goodness, but my trusty Donvier failed me last Friday. I made a salted caramel ice cream from a starter mix (one that had given me weird results last year) and when I put the ice cream into the freezer canister no magic whatsoever occurred. It remained soup. I put the entire canister back in the deep freeze and it remained caramel soup. I poured some of it into oatmeal stout, where it made truly delectable beer floats, but there was still a bloody quart of this stuff to contend with so at my husband's suggested I bought an angel food cake, poked holes in it, and poured the caramel soup into the cake. This was more difficult than it sounds but the end results were pretty tasty.
But now I don't trust my ice cream maker not to fail me. :(
Big mistake. This "ice cream" was more like a fluffy sherbet or even a fine-grained Hawaiian shaved ice. It tasted very faintly of lavender and ginger. I can handle some pretty intense levels of both lavender and ginger so this experience was underwhelming in the extreme. I ended up swapping with my husband, and let me say that after trying the vegan Lavender Ginger that Orange Clove sorbet was delicious- and, despite being completely non-dairy and not pretending to be otherwise, far more creamy and pleasing in texture than the rice cream.
Normally I'd retaliate against such an experience by whipping up my own batch of lavender goodness, but my trusty Donvier failed me last Friday. I made a salted caramel ice cream from a starter mix (one that had given me weird results last year) and when I put the ice cream into the freezer canister no magic whatsoever occurred. It remained soup. I put the entire canister back in the deep freeze and it remained caramel soup. I poured some of it into oatmeal stout, where it made truly delectable beer floats, but there was still a bloody quart of this stuff to contend with so at my husband's suggested I bought an angel food cake, poked holes in it, and poured the caramel soup into the cake. This was more difficult than it sounds but the end results were pretty tasty.
But now I don't trust my ice cream maker not to fail me. :(
