I scream!

Summer in Townsville is hot, humid, sticky, and sometimes a little unpleasant.  Don't get me wrong - I kind of love it, but sometimes you need a little relief.  On really hot weekends, we head along to the cinema, or the library, or the museum, where the airconditioning is cranked up so much that you can almost see your breath.

But I think we'll need fewer trips like that now that we have our very own ice cream maker.

I have been noticing all of K&Toby's ice cream posts and thought it would be a wonderful addition to the house.  I didn't seriously consider getting one, though, until Andy's mum gave me a gift certificate to the bookshop for my birthday.  As I browsed books online, I noticed that Vegan Scoop was just the right price for my gift cert.  I mentioned it to Andy, jokingly at first, but then we started investigating ice cream makers.  I did some googling, and fell in love with the looks of the Cuisinart - at around $120 they're more expensive than some ice cream makers around, but they have a 1.5 litre capacity so we rationalised that it was worth the extra.  Then we found a place online selling them for $90, but alas, they were out of stock.  The next weekend, we got a flyer from a kitchenwares shop in our mailbox with the Cuisinart ice cream makers splashed across the front, for $99.  It was exciting timing, so we hopped along to the obnoxious shopping centre (and later vowed never again to enter Stockland's in the month of December...) and picked one up.  It's orange!

And we placed our order for Vegan Scoop.  Unfortunately, it has yet to arrive - I guess they weren't overestimating when they said it would be 10-15 working days.  In the meantime, I did some googling and came up with a recipe for vanilla ice cream using coconut milk, sugar, cornflour, and a vanilla bean.  Simple but delicious, and a great way to inaugurate our new machine.

It churned away for 30 minutes while I chopped veggies for dinner, and then we tipped it into a tupperware and put it in the freezer for later.  Served up with a bowlful of mango, it was a delicious end to a hot night (though our dessert was interrupted by Nacho yowling and growling at a neighbour cat, who keeps coming round to harras her - does anyone have any tips for keeping cats away?).

Our plans for christmas now involve an ice cream pie of some kind, and I can't wait for Vegan Scoop to arrive so I can spend the summer playing around with different ice cream flavours!