Can't type, eating

I don't know where the time has gone.  Part of it is due to my schedule picking up at work - my brain is now more occupied during most of the day, so I have less brainpower leftover to devote to blogging. It's also peak allergy season for me and I spend most of the day in a fog, despite taking anti-histamines that don't deliver on the promise of mental clarity (Claritin clear! stupid commercial...).

I've also been making more ice cream.

The Kitchen Aid mixer attachment arrived last week, and promptly went into the freezer. The attachment is a very heavy bowl with some sort of ice pack-type liquid inside that needs to be frozen solid before you attempt to use it. In the reviews online, the unanimous suggestion was to freeze the bowl for longer than the recommend 15 hours or so - a number of people indicated they just left their bowl in the freezer in order to be ready to make ice cream at a moment's notice. You'll be prepared in the event you're overcome by a sudden, overwhelming urge to make ice cream.

This time I tried a double ginger recipe as written by David Lebovitz for Fine Cooking magazine. I cut back on the sugar again since we don't like desserts that are overly sweet, and infused the warmed milk with fresh ginger slices for a good two hours. Despite the long infusion time, I didn't find it to be gingery enough - I wanted a sharper, snappier taste. I was hoping to find ginger extract at Whole Foods but no luck. The crystallized ginger chunks helped, but it wasn't quite the flavour I was looking for. The next time I will probably try grating the ginger or extracting the juice, if I feel ambitious, but for now my first attempt with the rocky road recipe wins.

There will probably be another experiment since the mixer attachment works like a dream. The other tip that I read online was to pour your custard into the special mixing bowl using a container with a spout, or else you would have a gloppy mess on your hands (and counter). The measuring cup worked just fine, and within 20 mins we had ice cream the consistency of soft serve. It melts fast, as I found out when I was transferring the soft mixture into a container - the next time I'll freeze it in the special bowl for a while first, to firm it up and to make the transfer easier.

So even though we have a container (mostly) full of double ginger ice cream in the freezer, I'm already thinking about the next batch. Any requests for the next ice cream flavour?