Homemade Ice Cream

One of the great pleasures of summer is homemade ice cream, frozen in a wooden ice cream freezer that is packed with layers of ice and rock salt.  I can not think of a single summer in my whole lifetime that has not included this sweet ritual.  My father still has the ice cream freezer that he has used for over half a century.  Mine is of a similar vintage that I found for $5 at a flea market.

Before you start imagining that my entire family possesses steel like biceps from churning all that ice cream, I must admit that while our freezers are vintage, they are also electric 🙂

This is the  ice cream recipe I use the most:

Title: Vanilla Ice Cream

Description:
This is my favorite receipe of Mom’s for Vanilla Ice Cream.   It wasn’t her favorite though, she was known to cut down on the sugar as she thought it was too sweet.   I think that it is just about right the way it is listed in the receipe.   Use very good vanilla.   I like ground vanilla beans because of their added depth of flavor.

Ingredients:
1 can Eagle Brand Milk
3 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1 pint half & half
1/2 pint light cream
1 tsp. vanilla
1 quart milk

Directions:
Heat Eagle Brand, eggs, sugar in top of double boiler.   Add half & half, cream and vanilla.
Add one quart of milk.   Cool in refrigerator.   Freeze in ice cream freezer.

Each year on my birthday, my husband bakes me a cake.  Since my birthday this year was just five days after my son’s wedding and our refrigerator was still full of left over wedding cake, I requested ice cream instead 🙂  I actually got two batches, vanilla on my birthday and blueberry a few days later, over the weekend, when our whole family gathered to celebrate.

To make the blueberry version I used the same recipe as above, but added two pints of fresh blueberries that I pureed in the blender.  I also increased the sugar to 2/3 of a cup.  Then topped the frozen ice cream with a generous amount of fresh whole blueberries.