dying is easy. chocolate ice cream is hard.

 
I have made chocolate ice cream before. And it was even good. I swear! (If I were just stating my view, I would say, "It was amazing!" But I will allow for the possibility that others may have found it merely good.) So perhaps I went into this with a little too much confidence.

The Ben and Jerry's ice cream book, a great resource

I love that Ben and Jerry give you two different chocolate ice cream recipes, each with a different level of richness (Ben's is super rich, Jerry's is medium rich)

I decided to do Ben's as I'd done before, but with some minor modifications

The recipe was soooo chock-full of fat and sugar, that I decided to use Splenda's half sugar/half Splenda baking mix instead of pure sugar, and I used 2/3 a cup of heavy cream and 1/3 cup of half and half instead of a full cup of cream. These both should have been very minor details that didn't impact the final product majorly. And I still don't think they did.

Off I went, making the ice cream base...

Melting the chocolate in the microwave, in 30-second bursts... so far, so good

Making the egg, sugar and cream base... the custard came out nice and thick as it should have

But somewhere before I mixed everything together, I made what I think was my fatal error. In my desire to make the process quicker, I opted to do the chocolate melting in the microwave instead of in a double boiler set-up (which worked fine for the melting stage), and I avoided heating the chocolate and milk too hot so as to speed up the cooling. This was my big mistake. The chocolate never fully dissolved in the milk, and I assumed it would work itself out in the freezing process. Dumb.

Mixing the custard and the chocolate together, you can see the grainy texture (but by now, it's too late to do anything about it)

After an inadequate cooling period (by this point, I didn't care too much anyway), I started running the mixture through the ice cream maker

And would you believe it? It refused to freeze! (But it did make a funny booty shape as it was spinning around in there.)

Completely dejected, I stuck the whole thing in the freezer overnight (freezing bowl, mixing piece and all). And then next morning it came out mainly frozen.

It's not like I wasted all that much time on my failed chocolate ice cream, but as any female knows, when you are expecting chocolate and you do not get chocolate, it is not good.

But, we're supposed to learn from our mistakes, right? My lesson from this is a big "duh": don't take shortcuts, don't try to rush things and don't assume that problems will work themselves out. Had I just had a smidge more patience, I might be enjoying some delicious, creamy chocolate ice cream right now, instead of scraping a bunch of grainy, chocolate-ish crap out of my ice cream maker.

Don't make the same mixtake!

xoxo,