Guinness Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

If you're just joining me here at the old blog, let me catch you up on something I would be remiss not to mention: three years ago, I had never cooked a chicken breast or made a single thing from scratch. Last night, I made homemade Guinness Chocolate Chip ice cream. Seriously.

If that's not inspiration to learn to cook for you, I don't know what is! If I can do it, ANYONE can do it.

I've seen so many inspiring ice cream and sorbet restaurants floating around the internet lately and when I saw a cheapie half-pint ice cream maker at Target for $25 (it's this model), I thought, "What the hey? Let's try it." You can, by the way, make ice cream without a machine; Google it!

I wanted my first flavor to be two things: 1) Not easily available in the grocery store (to make it worth the effort and 2) Not overly complicated. I had two cans of Guinness in the fridge and found a recipe that didn't call for too many ingredients or too many complicated steps. Win!

The first requirement: freeze your ice cream bowl, preferably overnight. When it was actually time to start making ice cream, I began by mixing a cup of sugar with one egg, just stirring it with a wooden spoon until mixed.

 And it looked like this...

Meanwhile I brought the two cans of Guinness to a boil and boiled until it reduced by half. I then took it off the boiler and let it get warm.

I added 1/2 cup of milk to the sugar/egg mixture and stirred that up real well, and then it was time to mix in the Guinness reduction.

I used my best judgment...I didn't think all of the syrup was needed, so I tried to eyeball the right amount.

 Once the Guinness was mixed in, I added 2 cups of heavy cream and stirred it up. I put the mixture in the fridge for an hour (but got impatient and sped up the process by chilling in the freezer a little bit). Now: TIME FOR MIXIN!

 I poured half the mixture in bowl of the machine and churned it for about 25-30 minutes.

After the first 17 minutes or so, it was thickening enough to add chocolate chips, which I made by chopping up some Ghirardelli baking milk chocolate.

 I let it churn for what felt like forever until it got to basically advanced milkshake stage. I didn't know what to expect, but I put it in a glass freezer-proof container and put it in the freezer. I was nervous...what if I just made a bunch of terrible ice cream that was going to be a glorified milkshake? But...

It was amazing! At first the Guinness flavor was a bit disarming, but it totally grows on you, just like real Guinness! Also, seriously, it had the same consistency as store-bought ice cream, which was something the machine directions explicitly said not to expect.

So now, my mind is teeming with ice cream and sorbet ideas! I'm thinking of making champagne sorbet next...but do you guys have any ideas? What's a flavor you'd love to try?