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.

Key Lime Pie Ice Cream and Spiced Carrot Muffins

By Natalie

For lunch we went to Cheese Cake Factory and I enjoyed a delicious portobello mushroom burger. The fries were excellent. We didn't get any cheese cake, sad day.

I made Key Lime Pie Ice Cream. I had extra key limes from making a key lime pie for Father's Day. This ice cream is pretty tangy. I added some crushed graham crackers as a topping. There are quite a few recipes out there, I chose the one that didn't require cooking and waiting around for it to cool. I thought about skipping the step of refrigerating, but I think it made a huge difference. It allowed the ice cream to get really creamy before I put it in the ice cream maker. You should definitely try it, especially if you like squeezing 1 pound of tiny key limes.

My best gal pal, Jennie is trying a vegan experiment this summer. I wanted to help her out a little, so I decided to make her some muffins. I was perusing The Happy Herbivore cookbook and decided to make Spiced Carrot muffins (the link is to the cupcakes, which are very similar to the muffins). This was the recipe in which I had everything on hand. The great thing about making vegan muffins is you an eat as much batter at you want! These are really tasty and moist. I didn't have any ground cloves, so I just subbed with pumpkin pie spice. I want to try the Chocolate Zucchini muffins next.