We first made Ice Cream Comets back when I was a Guide and it’s an activity I pull out every couple of years for the Rangers. Probably better known as “home made ice cream in a bag”, it’s a nice food activity with no real life application whatsoever but it’s fun to do occasionally if you want to make ice cream but don’t have the expensive machine.
Ingredients:
1 cup of milk (or cream, I suppose)
1 spoonful of sugar
A few capfuls of your favourite flavouring – I prefer vanilla but my Rangers have enjoyed salted caramel this week
- Take a small plastic food bag. Put in your cup of milk, spoonful of sugar and your flavouring. Tie that bag up well – open top bags tie better than ziplock bags or similar.
- Put it inside another small plastic food bag and tie that up well too. This will protect your ice cream from the freezing process.
- Take a larger plastic food bag and put your ice cream bags inside it. Fill it up with ice and a lot of salt – like, at least half a cup of salt. This is to make it really cold. Tie up the bag well.
- Depending on how tough your bags are and how good your girls are at tying knots in them, put it inside another one or two. We had one girl using four outer bags tonight.
- Shake the bag for at least half an hour to churn the ice cream. We found ours were more or less set after nearly a whole hour.
- Because of the salt, the bags of ice will get obscenely cold, almost dangerously cold. You will need something to hold the bags in while you shake them. Sleeves are no good, they’ll just get wet and salty. Old towels are great, tea towels are just about adequate. The worktops and floor will also get soaked and salty, so try to leave something, anything, dry to mop up with.
- When your ice cream feels reasonably solid – it won’t get as solid as proper professionally-made ice cream but it’ll become edibly solid – remove the outer bags, dump them and the ice in the sink to deal with later.
- Open the inner bags carefully, without letting the salty exterior contaminate the ice cream inside.
- Eat your ice cream comets!