Earlier this month I was talking to a friend of mine about my desire to make ice cream and she offered to loan me her ice cream machine indefinitely since she and her husband were not using it… ever. So naturally I decided “why not?” and borrowed the ice cream machine.

To test out the machine I tried a batch of a simple vanilla ice cream with chunks of chocolate and candy canes mixed in and had great success. So I decided that since I had so much alcohol at my place I needed to find ways to “get rid of” them without having to resort to either drinking, throwing a party, or giving them away. What was I left with was the idea of using them to cook with.

The idea came out like a bolt out of the blue… why not make boozy ice cream? It can’t be all that difficult and I am sure others have tried to figure out ways to make it work. So after some research online a young adult duo of Valerie Lum and Jenise Addison eventually authored a small recipe book called “Ice Cream Happy Hour: 50 Boozy Treats You Spike, Freeze and Serve”. BINGO!

I stumbled upon this duo via a post / article about them on Gizmodo which also featured a movie that gives a quick idea of what they did to create their boozy concoctions and also immediately I was sold. So I bought the book via Amazon.com and waited patiently for the book to arrive to create to give a recipe a try.

Now before I go on, perhaps I should give a run down of drinks I have residing at my place:

• 2 bottles of white wine
• 1 bottle of red wine
• 1 bottle of raspberry wine
• 1 bottle of spiced rum
• 1 bottle of kahlua
• 2 bottles of mocha peppermint kahlua
• over a dozen bottles of various beer from Weyerbachers

You know for a girl that technically doesn’t drink that’s an awful lot of alcohol. So where do I begin? Needless to say, due to my complete lack of knowledge of the different kinds of alcohol I didn’t know what would taste good with what let alone where to begin.

Since I am partial to the beer from Weyerbachers, I decided to start with the wine and champagne. However, if you have read some of my previous posts I use the rum and kahlua already in my baking so that left the red and white wine.

Well by process of elimination I decided to start simple and used the first recipe in the book – “Vanilla with Brandy” – as a basis for a “Vanilla with White Wine” recipe. When reading through the recipe I realized that part of the reason that other people had so much trouble making boozy ice cream was the fact that the alcohol has a high water content that the ice cream would freeze as opposed to being creamy… so how to counteract this?

It would turn out that the authors solved this problem by adding gelatin into the mix. In addition to the gelatin, the authors included very straightforward and yet detailed instructions of what to do in the process of making the various alcoholic desserts.

As of this writing I still have yet to read through all the recipes included, however, overtime I plan to find more and more ways to go through my alcoholic stash… get all my friends drunk on ice cream AND maybe replenish my stash with new beverages for future treats.

All in all, this is probably (one of) the best thing I bought for myself for the holiday season. Practical, delicious and simple. If you are like me and you like to play with your food… I highly suggest giving this a whirl.