Category Archives: Problems

One of the fundamental rites of passage for any engaged couple is to ask for and receive a machine that enables you to prepare foods you’ve never thought of making yourself. Things like waffles, bread, frozen margaritas, and fried candy bars are yours for the making if only you register the right way.

Already owning a bread machine – which we use only to make banana bread and only when we have some over-ripe bananas laying about – and cowering in fear at the prospect of owning a deep fryer, the wife and I chose the ever-so-sensible ice cream machine.

As stereotypically lazy Americans, we were surprised that making ice cream actually takes work, even with our newfangled technology. Often things have to be heated or melted or mixed or strained by hand before the motorized monstrosity even comes into play. Such a revelation would have led lesser couples to excommunicate such a contraption to the back of the cupboard.

But we persevered.

After some unsuccessful experiments with frozen yogurt and “light” ice cream, however, the wife threw in the towel. Heavy dairy is not her bag.

So I persevered.

But only a couple times a year when I’m alone and feel like making the effort (that sounds dirty, sorry). One such opportunity presented itself last month when I decided to finally put the instant coffee I had bought for this very purpose to use.

I found this recipe for Coffee Oreo Cookie Mount Gay Ice Cream one day after work and thought I’d give it a shot. And by shot, I don’t mean the Mount Gay rum. That ingredient was immediately jettisoned in keeping with my long-held “no alcohol in dessert” decree.

The addition of egg yolks make this more of a frozen custard than a straight-on ice cream. This recipe was also my first venture into “tempering” territory and I think it went surprisingly well (i.e. the eggs did not get cooked by the warm cream mixture).

The one thing I would change would be the time of Oreo addition. When I added them right before pouring the liquid into the machine, the cookies broke down and became part of the ice cream. So instead of little bits of cookie flecking the coffee ice cream, I ended up with a true coffee/Oreo hybrid.

This is similar to the melding, at a molecular level, of Seth Brundle and the fly in David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly. Below is a picture of my ice cream and Brundle-fly for comparison.

To fix this, I would wait until the last five minutes of the hardening process before adding the cookie chunks. This way they would get mixed into the ice cream without falling apart.

And thus, to finish with the comparison, you have what the ice cream should look like next to the original Fly: a garden-variety human with a few insect parts mixed in.

Ice cream and sci-fi: two great tastes that taste great together!