We bought the $50 Cuisinart at Bed, Bath, & Beyond and tonight my wife made her inaugural batch - a non-fat peach frozen yogurt sweetened with agave nectar and a dash of maple syrup, plus cinnamon and vanilla.
Me, I'm all about trying to duplicate Cherry Garcia or - my favorite flavor - some sort of peanut butter swirl. I tend toward brown flavors - chocolate, peanut butter, carob, caromel, and such. Colors that imply textures.
My partner has made ice cream in the distant past and I never have. All of your tips and tricks - lessons learned the hard way - would be welcome.
We've added the more important stuff - the slow cooker, the pressure cooker, the chest freezer, and so forth. It's time to start doing the research about the best bang for the buck for an ice cream maker.
We're a middle aged blue collar couple with no kids and just starting to add a second income, so we're financially luckier than many of our friends. Regardless, we still don't want to blow money just on an ego name or bells & whistles we won't want or need. We just want something we can pull off the pantry shelf a couple of times a month and make a good product with. We generally tend to buy a middle of the road grade - not the cheapo and not the fanciest. Quality, dependability, and a wise spending of the buck is what we care about.
Oh, and we're in north Seattle, if some local shop or manufacturer is suggested.
Comments please?
My girlfriend wants to make what she once learned as "buckey candy", but all the recipes we are finding require a pound of sugar per recipe plus in some cases paraffin. We use good organic fresh-ground peanut butter from the co-op, and she just got some good chocolate to use. If anyone can help us with recipes to avoid the ton of sugar I'd appreciate it. Perhaps a honey substitution? Help?
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Years ago my kid sister [now 58] put together something like that when I became a single parent. She typed and dot-matrixed printed them, put each page in a plastic sleeve and put them in a 3 ring binder. The plastic sleeves protect the pages in the kitchen and also from age a bit. I've added to it quite a bit over the years [the 3 rings] and when Sis' daughter grew up I sent her a copy.