One of the most unique products I came across at the Natural Products Expo East this year was The Curious Creamery’s products.  The Curious Creamy creates shelf-stable ice cream mixes and ice cream cake mixes.  Compared to the average natural product, they’re not as “natural” — an ice cream mix is, by nature, processed.  But they’re surprisingly “clean,” the ice cream is lactose-free, both are gluten-free — and they’re designed to let you get as creative (and healthy) as you want by determining for yourself what ingredients you use.

Let me walk you through our process and you’ll see what I mean.

The Curious Creamery Products

We have to begin at the beginning — a very good place to start, right?  (Anyone catch that reference?)  These are the products.  Ice cream mix:

Ice cream cake mix:

We haven’t used the cake mixes yet, so you’ll have to wait for an update on those, but these mixes are such a unique gift option (shelf-stable, so this is an ice cream you can actually wrap and give in a box!) I wanted to go ahead and get this post up in plenty of time for the holidays.  The cakes mixes work slightly differently (although they’re pretty similar), but I’ll just leave it at that for now so we can concentrate on the ice cream mix.

Ice Cream Mix in Action

This little carton — the same basic size and shape as any old quart of ice cream — contains this stuff:

“This stuff” is a set of instructions, a little booklet with more information, and two packets of ice cream mix.  The simple instructions are: add 3/4 cup of chilled liquid to one packet of mix, whip it right in the container until it’s expanded to the appropriate level, then freeze it.  That’s it.  But there are some nuances.

You can use pretty much anything you want for the liquid, which is the beauty of it.  You can be as simple as complex as you like, as junky or as healthy, as childlike or as “adult.”  You can even use alcoholic beverages to mix up your ice cream, although they recommend diluting (if necessary) to no more than 6% alcohol content so it won’t interfere with freezing.  We decided to try one super-simple “junky” option and another, healthier option.  So for our first batch, we used Cherry Coke.

You can’t use hand power for this, because it needs to froth up too much, and I don’t have a hand mixer, so we didn’t mix ours in the container; we put it in our stand mixer.  This ended up being a little bit of an issue, but I’ll tell you why in a couple of steps.  First we added the Coke (which, in hindsight, I probably should have allowed to get flat before I measured it) and the packet of mix to the mixer bowl.

Then we began to mix it.  First slowly, to get the ingredients thoroughly mixed together, then at the highest speed, to get it good and whipped.

And here’s where we discovered we had a problem.  It never whipped up high enough.

After reading the instructions more thoroughly, I realized I’d missed one little note: if you’re using a stand mixer, you should double the recipe.  I presume there just isn’t enough volume for the beaters to whip it well enough.  (I know it’s not my mixer’s overall ability to whip, because we can not only make whipped cream in it; we have to be careful not to end up with butter.)  Unfortunately, having already used up one packet, we just had to go with this for both batches.  It didn’t make very much this way, and was denser than it was supposed to be, but it was otherwise fine.

Having decided we were just going to have to make do with our overly-dense ice cream, we popped it into the freezer.

(Those are bananas below them, in case anyone was being driven crazy by curiosity.)  The finished ice cream was all right.  The Cherry Coke option was a little bland, and not a major favorite, but it wasn’t bad.

Take Two

For our second batch, I knew I wanted to do something healthier — fruit or something.  Since it’s autumn, I was leaning toward something like pumpkin spice, but no one in my family really eats pumpkin.  So I decided to go with apple instead.  I’ll put that recipe in another post (because this is already getting long, and it was pretty good, so we’ll give it its own space).  For now, I’ll just say that it was still remarkably easy, and it was good.  (Still overly dense because of my goof from earlier, but good.)   [Click here for the Honey-Apple Ice Cream recipe.]

In Summary

So this is pretty fun.  It would make a unique gift.  It would be a fun sleepover activity.  (Each guest could make her/his own flavor.)  And it’s free of gluten, lactose, artificial flavors, artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup, and trans fats.