Homemade Ice Cream and Root Beer Floats

Today’s recipe is for Homemade Ice Cream. I found this recipe in my mom’s recipe box and I’m so glad I did. It’s another one that I thought was lost forever. In fact, this is how I feel about finding this recipe again! Yay!!!!

Grandma and Grandpa were big on celebrating and we’d have this for birthdays and some holidays. Sometimes they’d make it just because they wanted to have some, like in the summer. They had an electric ice cream maker (thankfully not a crank one) that had a wooden bucket that the container sat in. I loved to watch Grandpa make it. He’d break up ice cubes or a block of ice in an old burlap gunny sack, put the cracked ice around the outside of the container (which held the sweet and creamy future ice cream,) and then he’d add salt to make it even colder. It seemed like an eternity until you’d hear the dasher inside the container start to struggle with the ice cream getting thicker and icier. Then it would be time to dish it up. After indulging in this decadent dessert, we’d move outside to listen for the chimes from the church at 6:00 pm each night, wafting across the cornfields between the small town near them and the farm. Then it was on to a game of Jarts (lawn darts – banned for a time because of injuries caused by them) or Croquet and we’d stay outside on the lawn until the sunset turned golden or the mosquitos forced us to go in.

I halved this recipe – my ice cream maker doesn’t hold as much as the old ones.

Here is the recipe as I made it:

Homemade Ice Cream

Beat:

2 eggs (you can use pasteurized eggs if you’re afraid of salmonella – I did not)

Add:

1 1/8 cups white sugar

1 1/2 cup milk

1 cup half-n-half

1 pint whipping cream

2 1/4 teaspoons vanilla

1/4 teaspoon salt

Mix well and freeze according to your ice cream maker instructions.

We’ve had our ice cream maker for a few years, but you can find one similar here.

There’s not much to this recipe. Just mix it up, pour it into the ice cream maker, and turn it on. That’s it. It’s so easy to make your own ice cream.

We used to eat it right away and not let it firm up in the freezer – it was just too hard to wait! Yes – it made for a softer, sloppier ice cream.

This time when I made it, I did let the ice cream firm up and then I had to try it in a root beer float. Just put two scoops of the ice cream (or however many you can pack in there) into a glass and add a can of root beer. There were a few essential summer treats we had a lot at Grandma and Grandpa’s house: root beer floats, Eskimo pies, and ice cream sandwiches. But the one we had the most was root beer floats!! Make your own ice cream. You’ll never go back to “store-bought” again!

 

 

 

 

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