Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream in a Bag

While we are done with our homeschool adventures, since each of the Trio have officially graduated, we are still a family who loves learning. As my Trio gets older, I happen to revisit some of our old content and fun to see what may be of value to homeschooling families today. That\’s part of the reason why I wanted to share this one time we made homemade vanilla cream in a bag.

Spoiler alert; we felt this was a tasty treat, but not worth the work. Ha! It was a fun learning experience though, and I am grateful for the times we spent together educating our family and learning in a non-traditional way with our unschooling/homeschool adventures. I hope to share more about our unschooling ways in the future, do subscribe below at the bottom of this blog post if you want to keep up with the various family & fun topics I cover on brandyellen.com/.

This activity is a fun family project that you can do regardless of your schooling status, we just simply used it as part of our homeschool studies since we were a homeschooling family.

I don\’t push \”just homeschooling\”, I went to public school, and had I not witnessed the changes for the worse in the system over the years, my kids would have remained there. Sadly, the system of public schooling is not what it once was and I saw firsthand the changes. I know that many parents struggle with where to get their kids educated, and I can have compassion for you.

There are some amazing teachers that my kids had over the years, whom I still admire. Still, the system as a whole needs a bit of revamping for it feels less like a school and more like something else … so if you\’re looking to homeschool, please consider subscribing to my blog (this site) by using the form below. I hope to share more of the homeschool files and ideas that helped our family during our 5-7 year stint of homeschooling via an unschooling method.

For now, here is one of my favorite activities we did –

Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream in a bag

I don\’t recall the exact recipe we used, but here are some of the ingredients based on using the images I have saved in my files here:

• Ice cubes
• Sugar (we used cheap sugar, but Organic Pure cane sugar may work just fine)
• Vanilla Extract (we use REAL vanilla extract these days)
• Milk
• Heavy Cream
• Salt
• Plastic bags (one-gallon size freezer bag and one quart or sandwich size bag
• winter gloves (it\’s cold to hold, as you can see in our Homemade Ice Cream YouTube Video)

We gathered up the ingredients and had a dining room table back then to use for the process. I say that because as I write this, we are living in a small nearly 2-bedroom (not even really a 2-bedroom) space that we cannot have a dining room table or even our own parental bedroom (we sleep in the living room), but we are grateful that we\’re not in our vehicles as a living space.

The thing is, you take for granted what you do have sometimes, so please be grateful for the space you do have today. Now that I got my preaching out of the way for a minute … here\’s how we did the ice cream homeschool FUN!

Every single ingredient had to be measured out by our son, with our guidance if he had questions or if the situation got dangerous. There are chemical reactions with some ingredients, not that it makes it dangerous, but if you have a wild child … parental guidance and supervision is always recommended for those kiddos.

We had to mix the ingredients together in a smaller plastic bag, I\’d say a sandwich bag size works but maybe go with a quart size. You most certainly need the main bag that will have the ice cubes to make the ice cream activate be a one gallon size freezer bag.

As you can see, our son has winter gloves on. The ice cream does get cold as you shake it for the ice cubes and salt with the creamy mixture in the smaller bag are working together to make ice cream as if you\’d do today with our freezers. You see, in the old days there weren\’t freezers; they used salt to keep things fresh and cool. That\’s why we can use salt today to activate the ice cubes to a higher freezing point.

Now I did find another homemade ice cream recipe, but it\’s not the one we used. Click here to get the full details on what to do and how.

Why use salt and ice to make homemade ice cream?

Here\’s your science lesson for this homeschool fun:

1. Why Use Salt?
   • When you add salt to ice, it makes the ice melt. But here’s the cool part: the ice doesn\’t just melt into regular water. Instead, it melts into really cold water. This cold water is even colder than the ice was before!
2. How It Works:
   • Imagine you have a bowl with ice cream mix inside another bigger bowl with ice. If you just use ice, it won’t get cold enough to turn the mix into ice cream.
   • When you sprinkle salt on the ice, the salt lowers the freezing point of the ice. That means the ice melts, but it takes in a lot of heat from around it to melt, which makes the water even colder than the ice itself.
   • This extra-cold water surrounds the bowl with the ice cream mix and helps it freeze into ice cream.
3. Mixing and Freezing:
   • While the ice cream mix is getting colder, you need to stir or shake it. This helps the mix to freeze evenly and makes the ice cream smooth and creamy.
4. Result:
   • After some time, the ice cream mix turns into delicious ice cream because it gets really cold from the salt and ice mixture around it.

Conclusion

So, using salt with ice helps us make ice cream because it makes the ice melt into super-cold water, which freezes the ice cream mix faster. It’s a fun way to learn about science while making a tasty treat!