Chocolate Lingonberry Ice Cream, Soda Update

My mother visited these past few days, after first visiting my brother. In between our houses is our dear old friend IKEA, and she stopped there and picked us up some IKEA food, none of which we should really be eating, but we did anyways.

We had some lingonberry sauce left, and I wanted it gone, so I decided to use it as flavoring and sweetener for coconut milk ice cream. It turned out delicious!

Ingredients:
1 can of coconut milk
2 tablespoons - 1/4 cup cocoa powder
Some lingonberry sauce. Probably about a 1/2 cup. The remaining 1/3 or so of the 400g jar. Let's just say "to taste".
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

(I need to start actually measuring what I'm doing, rather than adding stuff "until it tastes right" and then trying to guess at the quantities after the fact!)

Blend ingredients in blender. Pour into ice cream maker. Use ice cream maker according to instructions.

It came out nice and creamy; rich, but not overly sweet. it reminded me a lot of commercial coconut milk ice cream I've had. My mother who eats a standard diet liked it, as did the kids. And me, of course! I wasn't quite sure about it during the liquid stage, but the flavor worked better once it was frozen.

I was worried that this wouldn't make enough and I'd have to add more coconut milk, but it made enough to perfectly fill our ice cream maker (no, I'm not sure what size it is) and make 5 reasonable sized servings - I probably could have gotten six servings out of it and left everyone satisfied because it's so rich.

IKEA lingonberry sauce is almost certainly full of sweetener. We already tossed the jar and I'm utterly failing at finding the ingredients online, so I couldn't tell you exactly what it contains, but I think it is safe to assume it contains some sort of unhealthy sweetener, and quite probably preservatives and so forth. Anyways, I'm curious whether very ripe berries, bananas, or some other fruit would work as adequate sweetener for this, or if at least a little bit of honey or sugar would be needed to balance out the cocoa.

If you're not concerned about such things, some sort of preserves (strawberry, raspberry) would probably work well in place of the lingonberry sauce/

We have a Donvier-style ice cream maker, with a freezable insert, and I'm quite happy with it. I'm sure there are other home ice cream makers that produce better ice cream, but not needing salt and ice really helps for being able to make ice cream on the spur of the moment.

Now I think I need to figure out Swedish Meatballs, sans breadcrumbs.

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I stuck the root beer in the fridge, and we'll officially taste it this afternoon, when the temperature outside is warm enough to warrant a refreshing drink. I didn't taste it before that because I didn't want to go and release the built up carbonation. I guess we'll see soon whether it's flat or not.

The tea has some slight bubbles, but is still overly sweet, so I threw in another 2 tablespoons of starter.