No-machine ice cream

What a pleasing rhyme that title has (pure accident). I actually made this ice cream ages ago but have abruptly come up against the thing all bloggers must fear - not having anything new to blog about. I did cook something *interesting* yesterday but it turned out to be the *interesting* kind of interesting rather than the sort that makes your tastebuds cry out with glee, and also it wasn't at all photogenic. It involved a foray into a new grain, but I think I'll have to revisit it in a different form before it's photo-worthy.

Yes it was meant to be artistically arranged like that and it had nothing to do with the fact that it wasn't quite soft enough to spoon rather than slice

I was planning to write about the ice cream at some stage anyway as it's really nice and really easy, and we're onto my second batch already. I got the recipe from Everybody likes Sandwiches (recipe here), and I bookmarked it partly because Jeannette churned it in a hand-churner which appealed to the historian in me. I don't have an ice cream maker at all and I thought that churning with a hand was almost the same and so it was worth a go. I make no claims for healthiness but it's not as bad as many ice cream recipes out there - Jeanette said that she'd used milk with a bit of heavy cream, and I've tried it once like that and once with lightened Elmlea single cream. Both were v tasty. I quite like the frisson of worry you get when heating a mixture with eggs in it - will it scramble, or will it be ok? That's the sort of kicks you have to rely on when you're a university academic. The only other change I made when I did it for the second time was to omit the choc chips. Although mint choc chip ice cream was my flavour of choice as a child, I object to hard bits of chocolate in my ice cream nowadays. I think I'd rather pour warm chocolate sauce over the top to get my chocolate fix. The mixture isn't that colour naturally, of course, you have to colour it. The other reason I like this ice cream is that I didn't have any green colouring, so I used a tiny bit of blue - and it still came out a nice minty shade of green. Truly! I love that. It would even make up for it not tasting nice, but it did so that's ok. If you wanted to be really wacky you could use more colouring and have blue mint ice cream, but perhaps you have to be a pure maths academic to need that sort of a kick :)

So, the upshot is: you don't need an ice cream maker to make this ice cream (in fact you don't even need to bother getting it out of the freezer and stirring it as it freezes). And you don't need green food colouring to make green ice cream. What a confusing world this is.

I'm sorry to be posting about ice cream when I know that some of my readers live in the southern hemisphere. In fact, my antipodean readers have swelled by one in the last few days, as Munchkin Granny has Gone Down Under!! She is a very intrepid granny, and she used to make ice cream for us by hand when we were little, so this is particularly for her.