Easy Chocolate Icecream

D was looking through one of my America's Test Kitchen emails the other day and saw a recipe for an easy chocolate icecream. The recipe claimed that it made a creamy icecream without having to churn the mix in an icecream machine. He was excited and asked me to try it. Since there is never any room in my freezer for the bowl of my icecream machine, I was happy to give it a go.

It was pretty easy. You just melt some chocolate, coffee and sweetened condensed milk (which is used because it maintains its texture even once frozen) in the microwave until the chocolate has melted then fold in some whipped cream and freeze for siz hours.

It looked awesome, but to me it just tasted like frozen cream. I'm a big cream person, I will take cream over icecream as a side to a cake or dessert any day and I have been known to eat strawberries and cream where the cream ratio slightly outweighs the strawberry, but this was too much for me. I felt like I was eating thickened cream straight out of the container and I couldn't eat it. D, on the other hand, really liked it. He said it was really rich and you couldn't have much of it but he enjoyed the flavour.

It was an interesting experiment, but really it's not that much more work to make a custard based icecream, except I'd have to evacuate a lot of food in my freezer first. It's definately the way to go though. The texture is so much better. Give this a try though, it may just be me.

Easy Chocolate Icecream
from Cooks Country Magazine July 2009

1 tsp instant coffee powder
1 tbs hot water
115g dark chocolate, chopped
1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
pinch salt
1 1/4 cups heave cream, whipped

Combine the coffee powder and hot water until coffee dissolves. Put the coffee mix, dark chocolate, sweetened condensed milk in a microwave safe bowl and microwave until chocolate is melted. The recipe says to stir every 10 seconds for about a minute, I cooked mine for a minute on high and stirred once at 30 secs and once at the end. Stir in vanilla and salt and let cool.

Whisk one third of the wipped cream into the melted chocolate to lighten the mix. Add the rest of the whipped cream and fold through until incorporated. Freeze in an airtight container until firm, at least 6 hours or up to 2 weeks.