Homemade Chocolate Sherbet

I bought a new kitchen gadget at the beginning of the summer - an ice cream maker...Fun! I'm kind of addicted to buying kitchen gadgets. My mom bought me my KitchenAid stand mixer about 20 years ago right after college and it still works...I love it so (is it wrong to love an inanimate object?). I love to bake (obviously!) and think that everything is much easier when you have the right equipment. My friend V has an ice cream maker and after hearing of all of her imaginative frozen treats, I had to have one for myself.

The machine itself is super easy to use. You mix up the ingredients (make sure they're cold!) and then pour them into the frozen tub and the machine does the rest in about 20 minutes. After it mixes, you can enjoy it right away as super soft ice cream or put in the freezer to let it firm up a bit. The only real drawback is that you have to have lots of space in the freezer - space for the ice cream maker tub, and space for the container you're going to store the ice cream in (I use a glass container so it makes a huge difference to chill the container first, before adding the ice cream...otherwise it starts to melt right away since the glass is room temp). When it's 85 and humid, it also helps to keep your serving dishes in the freezer. I use ramekins so they are pretty easy to tuck into little nooks in the freezer.

So far I've made David Lebovitz's delicious chocolate sherbet several times. It's very chocolatey and creamy, and since it's only made with whole milk so I can pretend that it's good for me. It's made using both cocoa powder and dark chocolate so it's great for my fellow chocolate lovers out there; you really only need a little to fulfill that chocolate craving. I've also made a coffee and vanilla bean sherbet. While it tasted quite delicious, I left it in the ice cream maker for far to long so it got really icy. After that debacle I make sure to always set a timer. 

Next on the list are some more interesting flavors - grapefruit and honey sorbet sounds delicious! EatingWell has some really interesting sorbet combinations. Yum!

mise en place - so simple!

cocoa powder is melted in 1/2 the milk

the chocolate is melted in and the vanilla, coffee liquor and remaining milk are added

into the ice cream maker

starting to freeze

almost there...

done and dusted. And delicious!

Bye for now...