I should probably just write a post about my KitchenAid mixer since it is the most fantastic thing I own living in my kitchen, but I’m going to concentrate on the ice cream maker attachment at the moment. I don’t remember how I even found out about the existence of this attachment, but decided it was something I needed to register for when I got married. It’s the only attachment for my mixer that I own though KitchenAid has an abundance of them. Most of them I figure I would never wind up using. Although I only make ice cream in the summer, and thus only wind up using it a few times a year it was definitely worth getting. It’s super easy to use. I just have to make sure to toss the bowl in the freezer 24 hours before I want to make ice cream (which is the only drawback because I can’t just make ice cream on a whim) then pop the bowl onto my mixer and 20 minutes later voila ice cream! It’s much easier than the old ice filled ice cream maker we had when I was a kid.

I’ve tried a variety of ice cream recipes over the past few years. This year so far I have made strawberry

Thin Mint, and this cookies and cream.

I used the same base recipe for the Thin Mint and cookies and cream just replacing the oreos with Thin Mints and the vanilla extract with peppermint extract in the Thin Mint ice cream. This was the first egg based ice cream recipe I have tried. We never used an egg based batter for ice cream when I was growing up and in reading the recipes I always felt like it was going to be difficult to temper the eggs without accidentally cooking them. I finally got up enough nerve to try it out this year. It’s definitely more time consuming than making a non-egg based batter, but it wasn’t that hard. I do need to try some different recipes though because although the flavor of this one was good, it didn’t freeze well enough and  the ice cream was always kind of melty. I have a recipe for grilled peach ice cream that I think I’m going to try next now that peaches are in season.

If you have a KitchenAid mixer and you like ice cream I definitely recommend investing the money for the ice cream maker attachment.