Ice Cream Follies

Last night's experiment in ice-cream making was not an unqualified success.

We started with the peach ice cream recipe in the Moosewood dessert cookbook. It's more of a sorbet recipe, but it looked good.

It called for 3 cups of pureed peaches, one to one-and-a-half cups of sugar, a cup of peach juice, a cup of half-and-half, and a bit of vanilla. The yield is about a quart. Sounds good so far.

We found a bag of frozen peaches in the freezer, but it was only 2 cups. So we added some frozen plums we found next to the peaches. We had no peach juice, so we substituted orange juice.

The mixture seemed like way more than would fit in the machine. I guess that makes sense when you think about it -- 3 cups of fruit and 2 cups of liquid and a bunch of sugar is by definition more than a quart. That was easy enough to deal with. We did most of the batch, transferred it to the freezer, then did the rest of the mixture and blended it with the first batch. Since the fruit came from the freezer, it was very cold and all of it became ice cream easily.

The big surprise came when we tasted it. We have re-created the flavor of children's chewable aspirin! I suppose it's an orangesicle flavor. The kids didn't really notice, since they've only had the liquid stuff. For the adults, it was quite disconcerting. I think we'll cross this flavor off of our make-again list.