I is for Ice Creamish

 

My favorite food groups are the pizza food group, the hamburger food group, the donut food group, and the ice cream food group (I eat like an 11 year old). Today, I bring you something from the ice cream food group, and I'm going to tell you right now that this is another of those recipes I went into with very low expectations.

I've seen various cooking shows where the host makes ice cream by mixing up ingredients, pouring it into a pan, and putting it in the freezer. When it is done, it LOOKS rather like ice cream, but does it REALLLLLLY taste like it? We only have their opinion, but as someone who comes from a family who makes REAL homemade ice cream, I'm afraid I'm a naysayer on this.

My great aunts made homemade ice cream on their back porch when I was a kid. They would drive out to the Berkschneider's farm and get big jars of fresh milk, then my great aunt Ecie would mix the ingredients together and pour it into the ice cream freezer, add ice and salt, and then everyone would help crank (except me, because I couldn't even turn it once, and when I found out how hard it was to crank, I managed to be unable to turn that silly crank for infinity). We ate homemade ice cream with fresh strawberries from the garden, and if it wasn't strawberry season, then we poured Hershey's syrup over it, They only ever made vanilla ice cream.

(Funny story that has nothing to do with this post, at least not directly: my parents had friends who got an ice cream freezer after having visited my great aunts' home and having ice cream there. They mixed their ingredients together, poured it into the freezer, and when it was done, their ice cream had what looked like peach halves all through it when they had made plain vanilla. Turns out they didn't beat the eggs first, and the peach halves were actually frozen egg yolks!)

I found a recipe for No Churn Chocolate Ice Cream. This was my chance to see if the cooking shows were telling the truth or not about how wonderful this stuff was.

I even had all the ingredients on hand:

The steps were easy. Whip the cream (note: don't lick your finger if some of the whipped cream gets on it, because without sugar added, it's just fluffy milk). In a separate bowl, mix the sweetened condensed milk with half a cup of cocoa powder, a pinch of salt, and a slug of vanilla.

Pretty sure this picture is sideways
and pretty sure I don't care

Stir one cup of the whipped cream into the cocoa mixture, then pour all of it into the rest of the whipped cream and fold them together.

When it's all mixed together, spoon it into a loaf pan that has been chillin' in the freezer.

It looks like chocolate pudding with whipped cream stirred into it, and it tastes much the same.

A piece of plastic wrap over the top of the pan, and into the freezer, and now we wait for 4-5 hours.

Tick...tick...tick...tick...tick....

Well.

It's definitely ice creamish.

I personally thought it was too sweet and reminded me of frozen whipped chocolate frosting, which it kind of was.

The workplace taste testers thought it was good and that it tasted like ice cream to them. One said it didn't feel cold enough, even though it's frozen.

My husband thought it had a weird texture, and his overall analysis was "Why? Why not just buy ice cream?"  With the money spent on the sweetened condensed milk and the whipping cream, I could have bought two half-gallons of Great Value ice cream, as in REAL ice cream.

I can definitely conclude that yes, indeed, my low expectations were met on this one.