National Ice Cream Day

Happy National Ice Cream Day, everyone! In honor of this momentous, albeit manufactured holiday, it's time to talk about my new favorite toy: an ice cream maker. Big thanks to my friend, Kristin, over at The Unfussy Epicure for turning me on to this amazing little device. Until she posted about her experience making very strawberry frozen yogurt with her Cuisinart ice cream maker, I had no idea that ice cream maker technology had advanced so far.

The home ice cream makers that I knew always seemed destined for the next garage sale due to the amount of effort required (e.g., ice, rock salt, churning) to make the delicious end product and the difficulty finding a place to store the bulky machine. This Cuisinart, which I found on sale at Amazon for $40, gets around all those problems. It's small, making a maximum of 1.5 quarts at a time, which is more than enough for me and takes the sting out of flavor experiments gone awry. Plus, it doesn't take up much counter space and is easy to stash in a cupboard, if need be. But I haven't stopped using mine long enough to bother putting it away. No rock salt required nor any ice--just enough room in the freezer to store the bowl until it's time to make ice cream. Since it's electric, the machine does all the churning work and it takes less than half an hour.

So far, I've made lemon sorbet, very strawberry frozen yogurt, nibby chocolate/sour cream frozen yogurt, and two batches of licorice ice cream.

All have turned out better than I could have possibly hoped for. I rarely get excited about kitchen appliances, but this one is truly worth every penny.

Now that I've recreated one of my two all-time favorite Baskin--Robbins flavors by making licorice ice cream, I need to figure out how to make Daiquiri Ice (the original, blue ice--not the lame, lime version). Then it's on to new adventures like cardamom ice cream. What flavors would you make, dear readers, if you could make your own ice cream/sorbet/fro yo?