New 52 | Week 29: Homemade Ice Cream

Homemade Chocolate Raspberry Ice Cream!


On July 4th, I was laying on the couch watching an episode of "Barefoot Contessa" where Ina made Salted Caramel Ice Cream with her friend Rori. I was enthralled with the ice cream making process. I wanted to make fresh-tasting homemade ice cream! So I set about researching ice cream making machines and settled on the Cuisinart ICE-21 Frozen Yogurt-Ice Cream & Sorbet Maker. It was only $50 shipped to my house, so I went for it right away. Plus, did you know that July is National Ice Cream Month? AND that Sunday, July 17th was National Ice Cream Day? I was eager to celebrate National Ice Cream Day with my first batch of homemade ice cream! :D

Along with the ice cream maker, I also purchased a recipe book called "Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments" by David Lebovitz. In fact, after I bought the book, I found out that Real Simple magazine is celebrating National Ice Cream Month by having a blog section dedicated to ice cream. They interviewed David Lebovitz, whom they consider the #1 authority on ice cream.

Upon receiving the machine and the book, Todd and I perused the book to pick out our first ice cream recipe. I wanted to make a very simple ice cream the first time out. Not too many ingredients, and not custard-based. Custard-based ice cream is super-creamy and smooth, but you use egg yolks and it's not very easy for a beginner to combine the egg yolk with all the other ingredients without the egg yolk curdling. So we picked the Chocolate Raspberry Ice Cream. The only ingredients were sugar, heavy cream, cocoa powder, and raspberry. The night before you want to make your ice cream, you'll need to put your mixing bowl part of your ice cream machine into the freezer and have it be good and frozen for 18-24 hours. We forgot to do this, so we put it into the freezer first thing Saturday morning and made the ice cream Saturday night.

First you combine the heavy cream, sugar, and cocoa powder in a pan.


Then you whisk the ingredients until smooth.


Then you bring it to a hard boil on the stove (it will foam up). Then add the raspberries and turn off the stove and cover for 10 minutes.


Then you put everything into a blender and puree it.


After pureeing the ice cream mix, we put it into the fridge for 2 hours so that it's fully cooled down. After that, we took it out of the fridge. Then we removed the frozen mixing bowl from the freezer and attach it to the base of the ice cream machine. We put the mixing paddle in and put the top on. Started the machine so that it's rotating. While it's rotating, we poured the ice cream mix in.

The reason you start the machine first before you pour the mix in is because otherwise your mix could get frozen to the sides of the frozen mixing bowl.

Todd loved the taste of the mix already, and it's not even ice cream yet!


We left the ice cream alone for 20 minutes while watching "Stardust" on DVD. (Strange but pretty good movie, by the way.)

Magically, after 20 minutes, we had ice cream!

The consistency was a little bit harder than soft-serve ice cream, with some parts harder than others. We couldn't help but take a few bites, so delicious!

Then we put the rest into a air-tight glass container to put into the freezer.


The next morning, I had homemade chocolate raspberry ice cream for breakfast, on National Ice Cream Day! :D


I think both of us are amazed and delighted how easy it was to make yummy homemade ice cream. We can't wait to try more recipes! This will definitely be a regular thing in our household, plus we think it'll really delight dinner guests as well!


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About This Project

New52 is a project started by Peppermint and I to encourage each other and others around us to try something new every week in 2011. The "new" each week doesn't have to be something big. It could be something as simple as ordering a new dish instead of old standbys at your favorite restaurant. It's simply opening your heart up to NEW possibilities.

Don't worry if you're late getting started on joining in. It's totally OK if you miss a week here or there. We encourage everyone to keep an open mind about trying something new. This is a life project, and a photography/blog and even scrap challenge if you wish. If you participate this week, please leave a link to your blog post in the link list below. You can also post images to our New 52 Flickr Group! We would love to see what you were inspired to do.