Homemade Werthers: The Ice Cream Edition

When you have an ice cream maker, ice cream is incredibly easy to make, you can pretty much toss anything in there, turn it on and in 30 minutes you have a frozen treat (seriously, the recipe booklet that came with mine suggests using it to make frozen daiquiris, and I have a sneaking suspicion that store bought chocolate milk would turn into a great chocolate ice cream).  Of course that is just basic ice cream and the fun part is tarting it up a bit and this super easy "Philadelphia  style" ice cream (meaning it doesn't have eggs, meaning that it is good for a lazy cook) is an excellent base for whatever mix ins or additions you want to use, such as shards of homemade caramel.  And let's just say that my vanilla ice cream with caramel bits in it went over a LOT better than my pumpkin pie ice cream.  I used this ice cream as the base and mixed in these caramels.  

Start by mixing together 2 cups of milk (I used 1/2 whipping cream and 1/2 milk) with a teaspoon of vanilla and 1/2 cup of sugar.  Stir it until the sugar is all dissolved.  And that is the basic vanilla ice cream recipe; as the Breyers commercials tell us, you don't need all that crap in your ice cream.

You can chill that mixture for awhile before pouring it into the ice cream machine, but that would require patience and we all know that isn't exactly my strong suit.  Anyways, now you just follow the directions for your ice cream maker, mine is electric so I can just watch it swirl around, which is strangely hypnotic and I don't want to admit how much time I can spend staring into it, but you may have to crank yours.

Meanwhile, smash up some caramels with a rolling pin, I would suggest breaking them up into fairly small bits, I wouldn't want them bigger than an M&M, mini chocolate chip size would be good, although my plastic bag started to tear and so I stopped a bit before that stage so as to avoid making a mess that I would need to clean up later.

When your ice cream seems like it is just about ready, add the caramel bits and let the machine mix them in.

You could eat it right away at this point, but I let it hang out in the freezer for about a half an hour before digging in.  I don't think that actually made much of a difference.

Homemade Werthers

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas, I know I did.  One of my presents was a candy thermometer which I have wanted for ages, although it turns out that I am not the sort of person who does the whole cooking with careful precision thing very well and so on my inaugural candy thermometer where I tried to make homemade caramels, instead of lovely chewy packets of goodness I ended up having to smash a sheet of hard sugar into chunks with the end of an ice cream scoop.  They were still tasty though, like a Werthers that had been salted (you see I sprinkled sea salt on the top for that trendy fleur de sel thing).  Anyways, I think I cooked the sugar too long or something, but I am not entirely sure as I know next to nothing about candy making.  It was fun though, and since I used some of my Christmas money to buy myself a new camera, I have some lovely pictures.  And I have decided to smash the caramels even more and mix the shards into some homemade vanilla ice cream tonight, I will let you know how that goes.  O, and I used this recipe.

Start by lining a 8x8 square pan with parchment and lightly butter it.

Then mix the milk, butter and a bit of salt together and bring to a boil, then remove from the heat.  

Then mix the sugar, corn syrup and water together, stirring until the sugar dissolves, which if you are a bit impatient will feel like it is never going to happen because there is only 1/4 of a cup of water and a whole bunch of sugar.  But have faith, it will dissolve eventually.

After awhile it will look like this, pretty sugar bubbles.  Then you stop stirring it and only swirl gently so that it can turn a nice golden color.

When it looks like this, add the milk mixture, which will be quite dramatic and bubbly, and recommence stirring.

Stir and stir and stir until it reaches the correct temperature, and remember the temperature is key, you wouldn't want to over cook it or anything like that....

When it is exactly 248 degrees, pour the caramel into the prepared pan and sprinkle with sea salt and let sit until it sets, which in my case took about 15 minutes and then it was rock hard slab.

Once it is ready, either slice or smash, depending on whether or not you followed the recipe correctly.