Arctic Unit Study: Making Ice Cream in a Bag

arctic unit study

This was just a little activity we did at the end of the unit for fun and to celebrate all their hard work.  It turned out pretty well.  I had sourced a recipe from the internet but couldn’t find the ingredients (what is half and half??), so I kind of made up my own with what we had in the house.  Here’s what we did:

Gather the following:

  • Double cream
  • milk
  • sugar
  • strawberry flavouring
  • crushed ice
  • rock salt
  • small zip lock bag
  • large zip lock bag

icecream

Place the following in the small zip lock bag:

  • 1/4 cup cream
  • 1/4 cup milk
  • table spoon sugar
  • flavouring to taste (we used a few drops of strawberry because I happened to have some from cupcake wars)

Make sure there is no air in the bag and seal securely.

In the large zip lock bag place around four large handfuls of crushed ice (basically enough to surround the small zip lock bag), and add salt directly to the ice:

icecream2

We tried to ensure the cream mixture was covered by ice the whole time and we periodically pummeled the bag gently to ensure mixture was well combined and it froze evenly.

It is done when the mixture feels like soft ice cream.  Add toppings as desired:icecream3

It was declared a hit!

12 comments

  1. Wow, that seems so much easier than I had imagined! You have inadvertently figured out what half and half is – it’s half cream, half milk. It’s sold in the USA pre-mixed, presumably for the same reason that you can buy pre-mashed potatoes.

    I make “ice cream” by freezing chunks of peeled, ripe bananas for a couple of hours and then blending them with a stick blender and adding flavourings. Perhaps you could do a comparison of the two methods and the resulting tastes – for science, of course…

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