Ice Cream Failure

 

This is a little bit of a convoluted story about ice cream and failure.

This story starts with my mother in law giving me a recipe. She had acquired this recipe from a friend and is raved as a no fail bread recipe with only two ingredients. I thought it would be a great recipe to try and a wonderful excuse to buy a half gallon of ice cream. My thought process would be that I would make the ice cream bread and tell my dad about the wonderful uses for ice cream other than just eating it.  That was my plan.  Eat ice cream, try a new recipe for bread and pick on my father and report back to my mother in law on my success.

I really want to say that I executed the plan flawlessly. If I bragged on this as a success and smirked over my kitchen prowess, then know that I was utterly lying. I totally bombed on this.  I think  the fault lie with the ice cream. I thought it would sounded wonderful to have chocolate peanut butter bread. That it would be great to make into French Toast.  There is one thing that I failed to consider with Chocolate Peanut Butter Ripple, is that there is literally ribbons of peanut butter in the ice cream.  Cold peanut butter is stubborn. It does not like to mix and will not unclench its might grip in even melted ice cream.  Trying to get the chilled peanut butter to relax and mix with flour is a  nightmare that I would not wish on my worse enemy.  Once I had everything incorporated I popped it in the oven in a loaf like shape.

In all honesty it looked like I giant brown turd.  It did not look appealing and sadly it did not change into any sort of shape while it baked. It wen tin the oven looking like a turd, and it came out of the oven looking like turd. This was not the easy kitchen victory that I had anticipated. It was the anthesis of that.  My husband, the supportive champ that he is, shave me is best Paul Hollywood impression and let me know it was under proved. 

I had thoughts that perhaps I could salvage this experiment and then write I heart warming tale about over coming adversity and try to tie it into a moral or child hood lesson I learned from my father.

My glorious idea to salvage it, was to first slice it up, so it no longer looked like a turd. The second part was to bake/toast it to be like a biscotti and maybe put a little bit of fudge icing on it. Everything is better with fudge icing on it. Except it isn’t. It still tasted like stale ice cream, except now it was dry and the fudge icing made it really obvious that the bread was lackluster.  It was not what I was trying to accomplish and was a rather embarrassing kitchen failure. 

Sometimes things just suck. There is no way to make it not suck. Sometimes you just have to accept that and keep moving. On the bright side, I had still had ice cream. 

Tastes Like I'm Old

I never really thought much about my age and maturity until I realized that my taste buds changed.  There are just certain things that do no appeal to me now that may have appealed to me when I was a much younger lass.  One of those things is ice cream.  I feel like when I was younger, there were a lot less ice cream flavors than there are now.  I think as a kid it was neopolitan or rocky road, those were the two choices in the household freezer.  There may have been other flavors out there, but those were the only ones that existed in my world, unless it came off of the ice cream truck.

I don't think I realized I reached adulthood with my ice cream until I took my utterly charming yet sarcastic 14 year old niece to The Turkey Hill Experience.  For those people that are not locals,  Turkey Hill is a chain of gas stations that for some reason also sells a wide selection of ice cream, ice tea and lemonade.  They also sell it in grocery stores and I learned by from the presentation, it is accessable all over the country. The Turkey HIll Experience is a small factory like tour that is super kid friendly and for a small ticket fee, lets you eat and drink as much ice cream and ice tea as you want. There are enough activities to keep various age ranges amused.  

One of the most worth while things to do is the pay a little bit extra on the ticket and go into the test lab where they will walk you through how to flavor your own pint of ice cream.  This is where I discovered that I like a mature flavor in ice cream.

My niece, Hannah proceeded to mutter and laugh about how her ice cream was going to be the best one ever and she wasn't going to share.  Then she proceeded to put cotton candy extract into it, and my tastebuds retracted in fear.  If there was one flavor that does not appeal to me as an adult it is cotton candy.  I couldn't even tell you the last time I ate cotton candy. It doesn't exist in my world as a thing that I would want to eat.  As if the flavoring of cotton candy wasn't enough, she proceeded to at cotton candy sprinkles into the swirling white creamy mix, further distancing my inclination to steal her ice cream at a later date.  The icing on the cake  (of in this case , ice cream) was the cake batter icing swirl she added to it.  I don't think electric blue is a natural flavoring and cake batter icing sounds like something that would cause my dentist to whimper.   I am pretty sure that Hannah madeWhen it  the perfect ice cream that would leave me with no desire to ever try it, and that she loved. How I wish I could go back and ask 14 year old me if I would like cotton candy ice cream with cake batter swirl and cotton candy sprinkles. I wonder what my answer would be. 

When it came time for me to make my ice cream, I stuck to things that I knew my husband would like. (Honestly, I was a little ice creamed out from the one sample that I had.  It was good, but it wasn't even lunch time and breakfast wasn't that much of a long forgotten memory yet. I have never been a lets eat ice cream for breakfast sort of person.)  My boring adult ice cream consisted of chocolate and coffe flavoring with chocolate covered espresso beans and peanut butter cups with a peanut butter swirl.  I was informed by my niece that I was doing it wrong and then I proceeded to tell her that her uncle was going to eat her ice cream.  My brother, who was the referee in this adventure just rolled his eyes and made his own very adult flavored ice cream (cherry flavoring, cherry pieces and chocolate covered espresso beans.)

I would definitely be interested in doing the Turkey Hill Experience again, because it was fun. I enjoyed the different things to check out and despite realizing I am old and eat old people ice cream, it was fun to think about different flavor combinations.  Just maybe the next time I will be able to come up with something that her and I can both agree on is awesome.  I just hope it doesn't include any sort of cotton candy or icing swirls. 

Distance

I wrote and then rewrote a post on distance. I wanted to wax poetically about how grateful I am to be able to look back on things and see how far I have come.  Every time I would sit down to write about it, I would mentally distract myself with something else.  Oh look, my Pinterest board is feeling lonely, or look I have another life in Fruit Ninja was becoming a common place thing.   It is amazing that I could have something plotted out in my head and half convinced that I want to write about it, and then when I sit down to do so, I have utter and complete writers block and just get angry and pessimistic about the words that do come out. 

It wasn’t until I was writing out post cards to my friend Steph, that I figured out how to wrangle myself in, and found the perfect way to approach the subject of distance, by not talking about distance. I have a bad habit of putting myself into a box and not knowing how to get out of it. 

My husband had given me a book of science fiction movie poster postcards, and one of the first post cards was of Bela Lugosi‘s Dracula, which made me think of my friend, Steph.  A long time ago when there were still VHS tapes that could be rented, Steph and I had grabbed two pints of Ben & Jerry’s (Phish Food & Cherry Garcia if memory serves) and rented Dracula 2000.   

I don’t really like horror movies.  Or maybe I just don’t like the suspense and anticipation and possible over the top gore unless it is funny. There is something about the music that sets me on edge and gets me all wound up. Most of my friends have realized this over the years that spooky mood music will make me jittery and horror movies tend to have a plethora of mood music.  Based on the cover, Dracula 2000 looks like a horror movie.  It is dark and broody and has a gothic Gerald Butler on the cover.  

To combat my jitters, Steph had purposed a compromise.  We would fast forward through the parts that had potential to be scary and then rewind and watch them when we knew what would happen, so that they no long held the horror factor. (Writing this out, makes me feel like a VHS player commercial, and a really bad one at that. Do people even know how VHS works now?)  It took about three hours to watch movie and we probably spent half that time laughing and rewinding. 

A week or so ago I was flipping through Netflix and Dracula 2000 came up.  I was feeling nostalgic and put it on.  The shortest distance between years is a good memory and a bad movie. Laughter bubbled out of me as I recalled how ridiculous it was to take three hours to watch the movie, and snorted at some of the stars what recent films they are in now. (Nathan Fillion, I am not sure you were supposed to be making me laugh as hard as you did, but thank you for your enthusiasm in Dracula 2000).