Easy and Impressive Dessert Times 2

Like many of you of similar age, I received an automatic ice cream maker for a wedding gift. It's great, and I use it several times a year. Enough to justify a place on the shelf.

It came with a recipe book, and one of the recipes is the easiest ever - it is for "Fudgesicle Ice Cream".

The recipe is this, combine 3 cups milk (I use 2% -- I suppose you could even use soy milk, but I haven't tried this) with either 2 small (~3 ounce) or 1 large (~5-6 ounce) package of instant chocolate pudding mix. (Oh yeah, you can use any flavor of instant pudding - it doesn't have to be chocolate.) Whisk up the mixture and add to the already spinning freezer part of the machine with the dasher already installed. Let it mix and freeze for about 20-25 minutes. Then remove ice cream to a plastic container and park it in the actual freezer for about 2 hours to ripen.

Here's the fun part -- instead of putting all the un-ripened ice cream into the actual freezer in a plastic tub, put some into popsicle molds to make "Fudgesicle" pops. I took some to a dinner party, and they were very well received.

Here's the second fun idea -- spread the soft, or partially hardened ice cream on graham cracker halves and top with the other half to make s'more like ice cream sandwiches. Either serve immediately or freeze for later. I had this last night, and I promise that even those of you who aren't in the last month of pregnancy will want more. I suppose that one could add a marshmallow, but I didn't miss it, and isn't the appeal of the marshmallow in the s'more the gooey-ness anyway? Hard to simulate with a frozen confection.

You could easily dress either of these up -- layer your ice cream in the molds with nuts or thin layers of fudge (I am concerned that thick layers might stick), or cut a long, thin slice of banana and impale it lengthwise on the popsicle stick before inserting it into the ice cream mixture. If you wanted to coat in nuts or sprinkles, do it at an un-molding stage. Unmold the pops, roll or sprinkle with your topper and then either serve or wrap in plastic and re-freeze for a really great presentation later. Similarly, you can apply nuts, sprinkles, or even more crumbled graham cracker bits to the exposed ice cream on the sides of the sandwich. Vanilla ice cream or even better, vanilla with dried apple bits and cinnamon, inside a cinnamon graham sounds awfully good, too.