ice cream in a bag

i read a post from buggie and jellybean this morning about how to make your own ice cream in a bag. i've never done it before, although i've heard of it many times, but it sounded fun and easy enough. so when the bigs got home from summer camp, we went straight to work. now, mention the words "ice cream" to mikey and his excitement level skyrockets. he just couldn't wait for the ice cream.

i took a quick look at the instructions and gathered our ingredients.

we filled the large bags with ice and started shaking away. 

the bigs got tired of shaking about 25 seconds into the process, so i finished it off. let me just say that i will never, ever make fun of the shake weight infomercials again. just eight minutes of shaking those ziploc bags and my arms clearly had some new definition that wasn't there prior to this ice cream making process. i may even consider buying a shake weight for myself...or not. i'll stick to shaking for ice cream. at least then there's a delicious and motivating end product.

8 minutes of shaking later....and we had the creamiest, best tasting ice cream we've ever had. NOT!!!!!

obviously, this little experiment was complete and utter failure. isaiah's bag was a fail even before it catastrophically failed. it was like a double fail! i didn't check that his inner ziploc was sealed well, and when he started shaking, all of the milk just spilled into the ice. i should have known at that point that this was going to be a complete disaster. 

lessons learned:

1) if your gut instinct tells you that it's strange to put 1/2 a cup of rock salt into milk and expect it to turn into ice cream...it probably is. but, c'mon. who doesn't like salted vanilla ice cream. we were going for the salted caramel style...that's all the flavor rage right now, isn't it?

2) always follow your instructions step-by-step. reading it over once just doesn't cut it, no matter how photographic you believe your memory to be.  i guess it's been such a long time since i worked in the lab that i've completely forgotten the number one rule in executing standard operating procedures. 

now, off i go, packing up the brood and heading to the grocery store. if i don't, the mister is gonna be annoyed that i wasted all the half and half. he's not gonna have anything to put in his coffee tomorrow morning. maybe we'll even get some ice cream.