Orange Creamcicle Ice Cream: or, Condensed milk makes everything better

Sometimes, things are better when you don't try so hard.

Orange Creamsicle ice cream 1 (14-oz) can sweetened condensed milk 1 cup orange juice concentrate 2 cups half-and-half 1 tbsp vanilla Orange food coloring if desired Mix all ingredients, then freeze in ice cream machine. Note: If your ice cream machine's manual tells you to chill the mixture before freezing, wait until you're about to pour the mixture into the machine before mixing in the orange concentrate. Adapted from Borden's Eagle Brand Magic Recipes, 1964

I've been flipping through the recipes in my new ice cream machine's manual. Most of them are surprisingly reasonable. I always thought Cuisinart in the 1990s was a high-priced brand for the sort of people who could afford to impulse-buy a Jenn-Air stove. (These days the trendiest of kitchens use massive stainless stoves that look like they should be in restaurants. But in the 1990s, a Jenn-Air was the stove to show your neighbors.) Therefore, I expected to see a lot of impossibly expensive ingredients and unrealistic recipes. 

But it seems the Cuisinart people actually wrote recipes that we can make at home. Some of them are downright cheap even with today's prices. For example, the recipe for "Slushy Kool-Aid" is literally "make Kool-Aid and put it in the ice cream machine."

Someone had to typeset the nutritional content of a packet of Kool-Aid for this.

For this manual, I can't help borrowing our Pieathlon friend Poppy Crocker's idea of looking through books one recipe at a time. You should definitely have a look at her blog, Grannie Pantries. She shows all the things that showed up on dinner tables night after night, especially the things that food historians have tried their damnedest to bury. (And all the questionable things that were done in the name of "health food" in the crunchy 1970s and aerobics-class 1980s!)

Getting back to the book, the "Easy Frozen Lemonade" is as simple as the Kool-Aid: put lemonade in the machine. I think Cuisinart was trying to reassure you that you hadn't just spent too much money on a frivolous machine. It's not just for ice cream, you can also make slushies for the kids!

Because this is from the 1990s, we have recipes for low-fat (always low-fat) frozen yogurt. For those who weren't there, fat was the dietary demon of the 1990s. If you ever wondered why marshmallows often have "A Fat Free Food!" printed on the bag, I'm pretty sure it's a holdover from the era of SnackWells and olestra potato chips.

I think the massive early-2000s Atkins Diet surge (and its many anti-carb knockoffs) was a backlash of people who had gone half-crazed from several years of cutting every last gram of fat out of their food. 

As an anecdotal note, I remember the first news stories when Atkins was first taking off. Newscasters were incredulously reporting that people were losing weight on a pound of bacon and a half-dozen greasy scrambled eggs a day. Food manufacturers started putting "net carbs" on the nutrition label, and dieting experts got several hours of airtime out of debating whether "net carbs" meant anything. 

These days, anti-carb diets have gone pseudoscientific and morphed into things like "keto." But in the 1990s, we all thought that eliminating fat would prevent getting fat. (Never mind how much sugar went into "fat free" snacks to make up for its absence.) For a few years, frozen yogurt looked like it might unseat ice cream. After all, if it's low-fat, it must be good for you!

 

 

Moving on from the dieting relics of a more prosperous time, the more "laborious" recipes like the sorbets involve juicing your own citrus fruits. The writers seem to realize that we don't always have the patience to refrigerate anything overnight, so they helpfully add that you can stir your mixture over a bowl of ice water "if you wish to make sorbet right away."

On an economical note, I like that the raspberry sorbet starts with frozen raspberries instead of fresh ones. (Like I said, Cuisinart's recipe developers were surprisingly realistic about cost and bother.) That easily cuts the price of fruit in half, and you weren't going to spot the difference after blenderizing them anyway. We at A Book of Cookrye always approve of saving your splurges for somewhere you'll notice. And again, the Cuisinart people seem to have actually intended for people to make these recipes at home.

In an attempt to prove that ice cream machines aren't just for children's parties, they end the book with two cocktails. Both of them are as easy as the rest of the book.

The frozen piña colada doesn't involve tracking down cream of coconut and whatever else Wikipedia tells me goes into one of those things. Instead, you open a can of "piña colada concentrate" and (barely) spike it. Personally, I would add actual rum instead of a teaspoon of rum extract.

The strawberry daiquiri is slightly more toilsome than the piña colada. You have to put strawberries in a blender. However, the recipe writers use actual liquor this time-- if not much of it. Half a cup of rum may seem like a lot until you compare it to the rest of the ingredients. You'd get faintly queasy from excessive fruit and sugar before you managed to get tippled. I can only speculate that Cuisinart didn't want to be legally liable for the property and bodily damage that might ensue from using their product as a pinch-hit margarita machine.

That's one twentieth of a cup (that is, a scant 2½ teaspoons) of rum per serving. It's practically safe for children.

Aside from the occasional blenderized fruit, most of the recipes in this book are variations on the theme of "stir everything together and put it in the machine." Even the frozen puddings don't involve actually getting out a double boiler and making custard. They use pudding mix instead.

This brings us to today's recipe. The orange sherbet suggests that we "serve with vanilla ice cream for a creamsicle flavor." This is an impressively subtle sales pitch for using both of the freezer bowls that came with our machine.

After reading the headnote, I wanted to make creamcicle ice cream. My idea was simple enough: instead of making vanilla ice cream and sherbet, I would mix both together and then freeze. Both recipes direct us to simply stir the ingredients together and put them in the ice cream machine, so combining them added no extra work unless you count measuring out a lot more ingredients. 

 

However, I inflicted disaster upon myself right as I was ready to freeze. I double-dipped my tasting spoon and then realized you don't cook this. I'm fairly careless about tasting cake batter because it later gets baked, but we don't do nonconsensual spit-swapping in this house. With great reluctance, I put my ice cream in the microwave (stirring every 20 seconds) until the meat thermometer said it was again safe for everyone. However, our crisis of food safety had turned our ice cream into curds and mess.

It tasted like the smell of a trash can. I tried to tell myself that it was only so bad because it was steaming hot and that it would be better after it got cold again. After all, hot gelatin smells revolting but it turns out all right.

Our ice cream was less bad after freezing, but it still tasted like the wrong side of an expiration date. I quietly thanked the nearest available gods that no one was home to see me dump an entire batch down the drain.

However, I couldn't help thinking about how good this had tasted before I cooked it to death. So, naturally, I made it again without double-dipping my spoon and introducing microbes. The mixture tasted a lot better because I didn't have to cook it, which was such a relief. I had been faintly worried that my brilliant idea was an inherently rancid recipe.

Our uncooked half-sherbet turned out all right wasn't anywhere near what I wanted. It tasted diluted, like fruit punch after all the ice has melted into it. I couldn't decide whether to save the rest or not. It wasn't bad, but I didn't know if it was good enough.

As I discreetly sent more ice cream down the drain, I decided I was overthinking the recipe. Why not forget the sherbet and add orange concentrate to the vanilla ice cream I've been making all this time? 

You need to add food coloring to make it look like this.

Yes. Yes it does. It tasted like pure happiness. This came out exactly how I wanted. I should have taken the easier route the first time. This tastes just like a creamcicle and is nearly no effort to make. (Well, no effort aside from having to use an ice cream machine.) If you have an ice cream machine, I think you owe it to yourself.