Cream Cheese Ice Cream

Upon reading recently about the possibilities of making frozen desserts like ice cream, gelato, sorbet, and sherbet at home without an ice cream maker this week, I decided that I had to give it a try myself. I've never made ice cream before, which is mostly because I thought it would be too difficult to achieve an appealing product at home, but also because I don't have an ice cream machine. Nonetheless, ice cream was being made a long time before ice cream makers existed, so I soon realized the possibilities of making this dessert by hand.

I quickly googled some ice cream recipes, got an idea of what basic ingredients are needed to make an ice cream, and checked what I had in my fridge. Although ice cream commonly has a custard base apparently, the most basic recipes have only whipping cream, milk, sugar, salt, and possibly some lemon juice. I knew that I had some whipping cream in the fridge that was going unused, I had milk, and of course some kind of sugar and salt. I also noticed that I had a block of cream cheese in the fridge as well, because I had bought extra when Jennifer and I made our cream cheese icing for the red velvet cupcakes. With these ingredients in mind, I found a recipe online for cream cheese ice cream: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Cream-Cheese-Ice-Cream-107998. 

The steps for mixing up the ice cream mixture were the easiest part of the recipe. I simply mixed together softened cream cheese, milk, lemon juice, salt, and sugar with a hand mixer, and then I mixed the whipping cream in. Instead of using white sugar as the recipe calls for (because I didn't have enough on hand), however, I ended up using one 1/4 cup of brown sugar, and because I was concerned about the ice cream becoming brown, I used two 1/4 cups of icing sugar as well. I suppose I could have also used something like honey as a sweetener in the ice cream.

This is what the ice cream mixture looks like once it's mixed.

The next step was to pour the mixture into a plastic container that can go in the freezer. As the ice cream was freezing, I kept mixing it if I could remember to. What I learned through my reading on the subject is that if you make ice cream without the use of an ice cream maker, there's the danger that the ice cream won't be as smooth as you'd like and ice crystals could form. This causes an unpleasant, grainy texture in the ice cream. The suggestion is that you keep mixing the ice cream throughout the freezing process to break up the ice crystals and help to create a smoother ice cream.

I was actually quite thrilled with my first try making ice cream. For one thing, it actually looked like ice cream and it tasted delicious. I think it could have used something to cut through the richness of the cream cheese though. I'll definitely try it with some strawberries next time. The texture of the ice cream wasn't quite perfect, but I suppose that's a difficult thing to achieve when  you're making ice cream without a machine.

If you want to make homemade ice cream yourself without an ice cream machine, you might want to refer to some of the source material I looked at. The following gave me a lot of the information I needed to do it: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2007/07/making-ice-crea-1/.