Shake, rattle and roll

I hope you all had a fantastic Memorial Day weekend! I certainly did. And it was capped off yesterday evening by some homemade ice cream!

No, I haven't bought an ice cream maker yet, but it turns out that one of my friends has one of those soccer-ball ice cream makers, so we gave it a whirl! (Get it - a whirl? It's a ball - so you shake it and roll it around? I got a million of 'em.)

Turns out the ball is not actually designed to be kicked around the yard. It's plastic with an inner core where the ice cream fixins go, so if you kicked it, you'd break the ball - maybe not on the first kick, but before you could actually get your delicious ingredients frozen, so what would be the point of that, eh?

We filled the inner core of the ball with cream, crushed up Oreo cookies and...other stuff (I wasn't paying attention), and then we filled the space around the core with ice cubes and rock salt, and then we commenced ta shakin'.

We shook it like a conga, but that got kinda heavy, so then we mostly sat on the floor and rolled it around to each other. After 10 minutes, we checked and it was still pretty soupy. We had to pour out the melted ice and salt and refill it. More shaking and rolling for 10 minutes. We checked again and it was still a little too liquidy, but you could see that it was icing up along the sides of the inner core. So we scraped the sides, refilled the ice and salt, and gave it one more session of shaking and rolling.

It was tasty, but it was just barely enough. We had 4 adults and a child, and it was fine for us because we were pretty full from a great spread of smoked brisket, fresh corn on the cob, potato rolls and grilled asparagus, but I can see where you'd normally want more output. My friend says they've come out with a larger sized ball, so if there's more than 2 or 3 of you usually eating the ice cream, and you want the soccer ball ice cream experience, you'd probably want the larger size.

So it was cool to make the ice cream, and it sure did taste good! I'm definitely going to get an ice cream maker. Anyone else who wants to continue my research into the subject should feel free to invite me over for more field research. Thanks V&D for the fantabulous Memorial Day feast!