Whoops.
My mishaps as of late are not confined to ankle problems…
I don’t mind making mistakes when I cook, if the results are still somewhat edible. Screw-ups make for funny stories.
So here are three: Chocolate-Banana Vesuvius, Sweet-Tooth Eggplant Sauce, and Overflowing Cauliflower Stew. (I’m going to do three separate posts, because I don’t want this to become monster-long.)
Chocolate-Banana Vesuvius (pictured above) was my first attempt at making chocolate almond milk ice cream, from this recipe. I’m at the point where I already have lots of stuff lying around from previous recipes, so all I needed to buy was bananas (I don’t buy them often… sorry, bananas).
The real problem was my miniature food processor, which has proven to be very cute but not very functional. I use it in situations that call for a blender, and it was only a matter of time until I pushed it too far. I could see that the chocolate mixture was seeping out, and decided to move quickly. Grab, move, pour — but the food processor bowl is donut-shaped. And maybe my aim was off? Half went into the ice cream churn and half … didn’t.
And then I laughed rather hysterically for a few minutes.
Me being me, I let the ice cream that made it churn before I cleaned up the ice cream maker. The consistency was much more solid than previous almond milk ice cream attempts, thanks to the bananas.
Reward for cleaning up.
It might have been user error, but I thought the ice cream tasted way more banana than chocolate. Like… I could hardly taste the chocolate? I added some sprinkles to improve the overall flavor.
When life hands you ice cream…
A few days later I noted that my kitchen smelled strongly of chocolate… and realized that I needed to scrape chocolate gunk off the inner sides of my dishwasher door. The gift that keeps on giving.
I recently re-did the recipe, sans bananas (just because I didn’t have any around… and still haven’t gotten myself a blender). Once I sent it to the churn, I realized that I’d probably used too much chocolate — since the ratio of chocolate to everything else was higher — but it actually tasted okay. I might try it again with less chocolate and/or sugar, just for comparison’s sake. Here’s the non-banana version, coned once again:
Happy time.
Without the banana, the consistency was more watery. The ice cream basically disintegrated the cone from within.
In any recipe without banana, there’s this thick layer of frozen ice cream that gets up around the sides of the freezer bowl and take a LOT of elbow grease to scoop out. (You could always just wash it away with hot water, but it’s a good amount of deliciousness.) And that scrape-out stuff is usually what I stow in the freezer for later, because it’s not… ice-cream like. It freezes into weird crystals. Tasty ones, but still.
I can’t remember that happening with the banana, but then again… I was distracted by the mess. And I think I ate it all right away? I mean, it was only half yield at most! And I needed some comfort food.
In short, every almond milk ice cream recipe has been edible, but nothing has been perfected.
Stay tuned for mishap #2… It’s the most minor, really. (Sorry to under-sell it.)
xoxo…
Posted by yapplebee 
