Homemade Ice Cream!

At the Mill Creek Garage Sales back in October I found an ice cream maker for only $4! It was in really nice shape and actually looked like it had never been used. The lady did say she used it and the ice cream turned out really good she just never used it enough. The only thing she didn't have was the instruction manual, but thankfully the internet has everything and I found the manual online and printed it out for free at the library! 

I made sure that during my November shopping trip that I bought both heavy cream and half and half so we could try out the machine! 

We decided to go with chocolate as our first flavor. First we mixed all the ingredients together and then got the machine set up with the ice and the salt. The nice thing is you don't have to use rock salt you just use table salt. I ended up buying a 25lb bag of salt at Sam's Club for less than $6! We turned on the ice cream maker and set the timer. During the whole process you have to add more ice and salt as you go. Thankfully I was in the process of making dinner so I was already hanging out in the kitchen so I could keep an eye on it. Those holes on each corner were where I would drop in more ice and salt. The manual said it would take between 18 - 25 minutes for normal ice cream to be ready and about a 1 minute shy of 25 minutes I heard a change in the sound of the machine....like it was working harder...and I knew it was done. 

It was still very much soft serve ice cream so I stuck it in the freezer for later. It didn't freeze as fast as I thought so we ended up not getting to eat it until the next day. It was fabulous! The one thing I've learned is I need to take the ice cream out of the tin and put it in a Tupperware container before freezing. It's fine to freeze it in the tin, but then you can't make any more ice cream since there is only one tin. Also when you take it out of the freezer it is so cold that it actually feels like it's burning your hands when you're holding it! 

The next flavor we are going to make is vanilla with broken up chunks of Butterfingers....all that Halloween candy is going to come in handy!