I am the Kat that Walks By Itself

I checked my postings, and it has been more than a year since I last did an ice cream experiment!

( Igor! Dust off the machinery! Clean up the bowls! It is experiment-time! )

Deep in the darkness, the pounding beat is heard...
( Igor! Pulverize that mint! )

Deep in the Woods of... Icecreamlandia... a loud grinding is heard...
( Igor, at what kind of house sale does one come back with gingerbread? )

Deep in the Citadel of Gallifrey, dust is wiped off a Machine...
( Igor, no, this ice cream is not called The Doctor! )

I don't cook much. What I do is normally on the level of tossing together a stir-fry (and of course, my ice cream experiments, if that counts as cooking when nothing is actually, you know, cooked).

However, today, for no particular reason (unless craving sweets counts) I wanted to Mess With Stuff. Which I never do. Except I did. And I was fully expecting it to be awful, and burnt and stuff. And it wasn't.

Oh, what did I do?

Well, I wondered what would happen if I took some cocoa butter and a tin of evaporated milk and put them together with some sugar... I had a vague idea that one makes caramel with sweetened condensed milk and sugar, but I didn't have any condensed milk. So... It was rather a journey towards the unknown...

First I took a couple of lumps of cocoa butter (yes, lumps) and melted them in the microwave.
Took the little bag of fructose that had been sitting in my cupboard for a long time, and stirred six tablespoons into the melted cocoa butter.
Poured in one tin of evaporated milk. Stirred.
Decided I definitely wanted something caramelly but flavoursome... so I added in three heaped tablespoons of Extract of Malt (the syrup, not the Malted Milk Powder that is more common).
Did a bunch more stirring.
Put the whole lot back in the microwave, and watched it bubble, and kept on increasing the time. At least five minutes of that.
Thought it wasn't sweet enough, so put in the rest of the fructose. Let it bubble some more.
I can't quite remember the order of this, but there was a point where I thought it still wasn't sweet enough and added a cup of icing sugar.
However the other interesting thing was... it got to a point where it looked like we had strange oily brown stuff, and little lumps of light brown stuff all through it - really quite strange and odd-looking, and not at all attractive. So I thought, hmmm, perhaps this needs some emulsifying. So I added some Soy Lecithin, and then stirred the bejusus out of it with my Bamix. I'm not sure if it was the Lecithin or the stick blender, but it turned into a nice smooth caramel-coloured liquid, slightly thickened.
So I put it in the microwave again, and watched it bubble again. For at least another five minutes.
Then I took it out and used the stick blender on it again. And tasted it again (trying not to burn my finger). And it was caramelly. And sauce-like.
So I declared it done.

Caramel sauce!

So I poured it into a couple of jars, then had the last little bit on some ice cream, and it was delicious!

And I will never be able to reproduce this recipe again, because I was doing no measuring whatsoever.

In the mad scientist's lair, the sound of ice-cream making can be heard.
( Igor! You left the peaches out too long! )
( Nonsense, Igor, there's no such thing as too sour! )

Deep in her green sanctuary, the Vegetable Avenger stirs her latest icy confection.
( Strip every leaf, Ivy! )

I also got called up by someone from an Indian call centre, saying that they were from the "Windows Maintenance Department" and that my "Windows computer was having error messages". Of course, I knew it was a scam, and I led him on for a bit before telling him that there weren't any Windows computers in the house. I would have liked to have messed with his head a bit more, but his accent was so thick, I had to keep on asking him to repeat what he said, because I couldn't understand half his words.

The ice cream is back! There were some experiments I did last summer, but I don't have sufficient stuff written down for them to be worth recording. But yesterday I made the first ice cream experiment of this summer.
( If they're called Kurds, where are the Wheys? )

Ah, the strange things that make one laugh.
The song Bella Ciao came up on my randomplay, and I thought I'd look up the lyrics on Wikipedia. From there it mentioned that the song had been sung with alternate lyrics by Chumbawamba and I started reading about them. They sound like a band that temeres would like.
Then I read one paragraph that made me laugh out loud:

General Motors paid Chumbawamba $100,000 to use the song "Pass It Along" from the WYSIWYG album, for a Pontiac Vibe television advertisement in 2002. Chumbawamba gave the money to the anti-corporate activist groups Indymedia and CorpWatch who used the money to launch an information and environmental campaign against GM.

(Interestingly enough, the next song up on the randomplay was Jewel's "Life Uncommon", from which I take the title of this post)

On a completely different note, my lovely new big vertical freezer was delivered yesterday, and my little broken one was taken away. Now I have LOTS of freezing room. I plan to buy fruit and chop it up and either freeze it or make ice cream on the weekend. Mmmmm, apricot sorbet.

It may be stormy, but I made ice cream, because it was on my list of things to do.
( Achtung! Achtung! Ve haf vays of making you eat cheese! )
( Igor, what is that growing on the strawberries? )