Every good baker knows that you have to experiment with many different recipes, be willing to tweak ingredients here and there, and be open minded to new ideas when it comes to finding “the one”. That basic cake that you can proudly call the best, the one that we all dream to someday discover, fall in love with, and live happily ever after. For me, those dreams have yet to come true and I ultimately blame it on the fact that I rarely ever focus on vanilla or chocolate cake.
I’ve had many baking experiments in my life and it wasn’t until recently that I realized I haven’t actually made a real attempt to find my go to vanilla or chocolate cake recipe. I’ve definitely had over a dozen experiments with peanut butter cookies (still with no real breakthrough), but never any with cake and I find that surprising. I’m always too eager to jump into a recipe that requires something more unique, more out of the ordinary, and more complex than plain vanilla or chocolate. Maybe it’s simply because I always want to amaze people with something they aren’t used to or maybe I just enjoy a less common flavor, but either way I surely need to find my “one” and David Lebovitz’s recipe for devil’s food cake is a step in that direction.
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I am such a nerd it’s almost unbelievable. Despite being a really healthy eater I tend to crave ice cream on a regular basis. I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about the delicious freezing cold sugary custard like goodness that is ice cream. If it was realistic, I’d gladly live off ice cream for the rest of my life.
So anyway, I was back at home and discovered that we had no ice cream. Oh no! What was I going to do!? I didn’t even have ingredients to make my own! Of course, being a chemical engineering major, my first thought was to make ice cream in a bag. Duh! It’s like the one and only science experiment you should even know how to do! Who needs to know chromatography, crystallization, or any of that other silly chemistry stuff! It’s all useless if you can’t eat it! The best part about making ice cream in a bag is that it only requires everyday items like milk, sugar, and salt. The one downfall it does have is that it melts really fast, but who cares if you’re going to eat it right away.
Ice cream in a bag is great because it’s a fun blast from the past for adults, but also something neat for kids to do at home. Kids will love this so much that they won’t even realize they’re doing science and they get a delicious cold reward at the end! Waht’s even better is that you can make easy variations with such a simple recipe like this. For example, instead of milk I used eggnog because I wanted something other than boring old vanilla. You can also add chocolate syrup for chocolate ice cream or maybe even peppermint or strawberry extract for a more interesting flavor. But hey, if you like plain old vanilla, then definitely go for it!
What you will need:
- 1/2 cup milk (I used eggnog for this one)
- 2 tablespoon sugar
- 1 ziploc sandwich bag
- 1 gallon size freezer bag
- Lots and lots of ice
- 1/4 cup rock salt (I didn’t really measure this)
Place the first three ingredients in the ziploc sandwich bag and then make sure you seal it tight! You don’t want any spills! Put enough ice in the gallon size bag to fill it up about halfway, then add the salt.
Place the sandwich bag in the gallon size bag and make sure the gallon size bag is sealed tight. After that shake, shake, shake the bag like crazy until the mixture thickens (about 5 to 10 minutes). I found it helpful to wear oven mitts while doing this because the bag can get VERY cold.
Finally, remove the sandwich bag from the gallon size bag and wipe it off a bit (you don’t want to end up eating the salt)! Now you can either eat straight out of the bag or you could do what I did and cut off the tip and pipe the ice cream into a dish. After that you’re all done. Now eat it fast or it’ll melt!
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