Black and White Angel Food Cake

By Natalie

On Friday night Micah made chocolate ice cream.  This recipe is awesome, and a lot of work. That's why I make Micah in charge of the ice cream making. The recipe calls for EIGHT egg yolks, then you end up with all of these egg whites. I started searching for something to make besides a giant omelet, and stumbled across a Black and White Angel Food Cake recipe. 

I've never made Angel Food Cake before. This isn't a dessert I usually crave. I thought this recipe was perfect because it had cocoa in it. I was missing a few of the ingredients cream of tartar (it's at school so we can make play dough) and cake flour. I subbed the cream of tartar for white vinegar. I used regular flour instead of cake flour, and it worked out! I decided not to make the vanilla bean whipped cream, because I was going to serve the cake with ice cream. I was so happy to have my Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Otherwise my arm would've fallen off beating 12 egg whites into stiff peaks. This recipe is fat free!

Ice Cream Debacle

By Natalie

For 4th of July weekend my parents planned a family reunion at the river in New Braunfels. They rented 2 awesome houses for all of us.  The view:

At one point we had 32 people to feed on Saturday night. I had high hopes of serving chocolate ice cream, key lime pie ice cream, and strawberry basil sorbet.

 
A few Christmases ago my fabulous Aunt B gave every family a cuisinart ice cream maker. Micah and I use ours all the time. I told everyone to bring there ice cream makers to the river. I had dreams of having 3 ice cream makers going at one time. Once we arrived around 5:00 PM on Saturday, I put the ice maker inserts into the fridge so they could freeze up.

Wake up the next morning, and they aren't frozen. Check all day long and they still aren't frozen. I'm so disappointed. I blame the fridge. I've never had this problem at home. My second cousin, Tandy had joked about bringing a hand crank ice cream maker. She thought it would be fun for the kids. I thought she was crazy! Turns out I'm so glad she brought the hand crank. She made vanilla ice cream and they cranked it out in about 30 minutes, everyone took a turn. This vanilla had raw eggs!

Nobody could wait to lick the ice cream blades.

Later in the evening the ice cream inserts had still NOT frozen, so we hand cranked the chocolate ice cream. Micah had spent HOURS making this custard. It's rocket science to make this recipe. It takes 16 egg yolks since he made a double batch! The kids took turns hand cranking it out, and it was amazing. We even had macadamia nuts for toppings.

We are a bunch of savages, and had to stick our fingers in the ice cream right away!

Thank goodness for Tandy and the old fashioned hand crank ice cream maker from the 60s.