Homemade Vanilla and Strawberry Ice Cream - No Ice Cream Maker Required!

Once you make your own ice cream at home, using only natural ingredients, store-bought stuff with lots of artificial flavors and sweeteners will seem unappealing. On a hot day that you have to spend inside, why not make yourself an ice cold treat? This can be a great fun project, and it is easy to involve your family in the process. In order to make it, you will need 2 large plastic or glass bowls for mixing and freezing, space in your freezer, a mixer, and for the strawberry ice cream, a food processor. 

Ingredients (to make about 2 pints each of two different flavors, vanilla and strawberry):

4 eggs 

450ml/1 pint heavy whipping cream

300g/1 pint strawberries

250g granulated sugar

16g/2 packets vanilla sugar (or 1 tsp. vanilla extract)

Separate the eggs. Add 50g sugar to the egg yolks and stir them in a bain marie. If you do not have one per se, you can just put a saucepan with water, which you bring to a boil, and then another saucepan placed on top (and into the lower one) with the ingredients, as in this picture:

Stir continually for a few minutes, until the sugar is dissolved and the egg starts to thicken slightly. This will pasteurize the eggs. Don't leave it until it gets lumpy! 

While the egg yolk and sugar mixture is cooling, beat the cream until it is stiff. In the second bowl, beat the egg whites and gradually pour in the rest of the sugar (as if you were making meringues, for those who have done that). When the egg yolk mixture is cool, add it to the egg white mixture and stir it in. Then add the cream and stir it in, until it is homogeneous. Finally, add the vanilla sugar or vanilla essence.

That is the basis for all ice creams, and it is only from this point that they diverge as you may wish to add different flavors, whether chocolate, rum and raisin, crumbled Heath bars or Oreos, or anything else. 

For the strawberry ice cream, the next step is to chop them very finely in a food processor. 

Obviously raspberries, cherries, and other fruits may be substituted. Take half of the base ice cream mixture and mix it gently together with the strawberries. 

 

You now have a batch of vanilla ice cream and a batch of strawberry ice cream ready to go in the freezer.

After an hour and a half or so, take the bowls out and stir them, before returning them to the freezer. This is crucial to ensuring that they freeze evenly and preventing ice from forming that will make the ice cream's texture less smooth.

Stir them again every hour. The last time I made it, the strawberry ice cream was ready in about 3 hours, and the vanilla in about 5 hours. The difference in time is because of the different compositions (the strawberries contain water) and probably also the different material the bowls I used were made from.

Before they get very hard, transfer them to plastic containers with lids, and they can now stay in the freezer until you are ready to eat them. They shouldn't stay in the freezer for more than a month - not that it is likely that you could wait that long before eating them in their entirety!

Your teenager can help, even with their cellphone in their hand, which is good news, because participating in making ice cream for the first time is precisely the sort of thing they will want to share on Snapchat!

Vanilla Walnut Crescents

From all the cookies I have tried making, these are among the best from a variety of perspectives: they are loved by everyone, the favorite of many, and relatively easy to make. The recipe is based on one that I found in a Romanian cookbook by Silvia Jurcovan, Carte de Bucate (Bucuresti: Editura Tehnica, 1983, p.437).

The quantities and temperatures given must be followed precisely - they are not "more or less." For that reason (and not just because the metric system is more widely used) I will give the quantities in grams. 

Ingredients:

250g All-purpose flour

200g unsalted butter

100g finely-ground walnuts

 70g powdered sugar 

   1 packet vanilla sugar

Plus roughly another 100-150g of powdered sugar to coat the cookies in after they are baked.

Vanilla sugar is not widely used in the United States, but most international stores sell it. If you don't have it, you can substitute by adding 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence in the dough. 

Procedure

In a large bowl combine the butter, 70g sugar, and vanilla sugar together until the mixture is fluffy. Then add the flour and walnuts and mix them by hand until the dough sticks together.

Place the bowl with the resulting ball of dough in the refrigerator, covered with a sheet of wax paper. It should stay in the fridge for half an hour or until it is hardened. Then remove the dough from the fridge. Break off pieces and shape them into golf ball sized balls. Then put most of them back in the fridge to stay cold, taking just a couple at a time to work with.

On the wax paper, roll each ball with your hands until they are lengthened into long sticks.

Cut the sticks into pieces 2" in length.

Curve the pieces into crescent shapes and place them on a baking tray (in most cases you will need to lightly grease the baking tray with butter).

Preheat the oven to 350° F (180° C). Place one baking tray with the crescents in the oven for 10-12 minutes. They should be lightly brown, as seen in the picture below.

After removing them from the oven, do not let them cool for more than 2-3 minutes. Then move them gently with your finger to ensure they do not stick to the baking tray. They are very fragile while warm! 

Roll each cookie through powdered sugar until it is evenly coated and place it on a serving tray.

They taste better after they have cooled, but once you know how good they are, it can be hard to be patient!