Mandy's Famous Bubble Gum Ice Cream

I'm not allowed to have bubble gum in the house.

This rule dates back to my childhood, when I would shove as many pieces as I could into my mouth and chew the giant wad, only to spit it out minutes later when the flavor began to leave.  I would repeat this process again and again until all of the gum was gone.  I once did this with a giant paint can of Tongue Splashers bubble gum (remember those, the ones that would "paint" the entire inside of your mouth?), and was pretty alarmed at what I discovered once digestion had taken place.  (I'll leave that one to your imagination, lest Cassie unfriend me.)

Also, I like to blow really big bubbles that pop and get in my hair and eyebrows.  It's a mess.

So, yeah, no bubble gum in this house.

Except that when you mention to your favorite 5-year old, sweet little neurotic memory-like-a-steel-trap Iris, that you're considering making some bubble gum ice cream, and that you'll make it before she moves away (and breaks your heart in the process--I'm still mad at her parents), and then every time you talk to her or see her in the interim she asks about the famed bubble gum ice cream--well, you've go no choice then but to buy a big ol' bag of bubble gum.  I actually bought two kinds: Double Bubble Bubble Gum for flavor, and some pretty colorful gumballs for beauty.

And you might think that since decades have passed since the Tongue Splashers incident of '91 that I have matured, that I'm a grown woman now, a professional, a college graduate.  Surely I would be able to resist the foolishness that is putting multiple pieces of gum into your mouth at the same time, right?  Right?

Wrong.

Shoot.

Fortunately, there was plenty of gum for me to go all Violet Beauregarde up in here AND to create some wild ice cream.

Note: this ice cream tastes like bubble gum.  It's not some lame vanilla ice cream with bubble gum pieces.  If you're a grown-up, it probably won't be your favorite.  But if you're seeking the love of a child (ew, that sounded way more gross than I intended), this might be a good way to go.  Also, do not be a pedophile.  That is gross.  Do make this ice cream for a kid's birthday party, so long as you're not on a sexual offenders list.  This note really took a turn for the worst.

Mandy's Famous Bubble Gum Ice Cream

Ingredients

2 cups half & half
2 cups whole milk
6 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
20 pieces of Double Bubble bubble gum
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract
3 drops peppermint extract (optional)
pretty colorful gumballs, cut into quarters
pink food coloring (optional)

Directions

1.  In a large saucepan, bring the half & half and the milk to a boil.  Add the bubble gum.  Boil for 3 minutes, and then cover and remove from heat.  Allow milk mixture to steep for 30 minutes.

2.  In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and the sugar.  Slowly add the milk mixture to the egg mixture, whisking all the while.

3.  Return contents to the saucepan on medium heat.  Stir constantly, scraping the bottom of the pan, until the mixture becomes thick and coats the back of a spoon.  Do not allow it to come to a boil.

4.  Once the mixture achieves desired custard-like thickness, pour it into a bowl and add the vanilla extract and peppermint extract.  You may also choose to add a few drops of pink food coloring.  Chill the mixture in refrigerator for a minimum or 4 hours.  Freeze in ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions.

5.  When the ice cream has churned, you may wish to freeze it further in the freezer.  Mix in the quartered gumballs.

Weekend Fun

This weekend was very productive, but also very relaxing.  In a nutshell: took a 5-hour nap, ellipted, ate dinner, baked a cake, proctored the SATs, iced a cake, went to a birthday party, bitched about how I couldn't buy Iris a Barbie for so many years, drank a few glasses of wine, talked on the phone, ellipted again, did laundry, scored some awesome loot from Craigslist, more laundry, lunched at Blowin' Smoke, planted peppers, sprayed the dog with the hose, more laundry, a 4-hour nap, skipped dinner and drank wine instead.

F'ing fantastic.

And here's what it looked like.

Strawberry cake that started to fall apart.  Eek!  Earthquake cake. 

Iris's first bike. 

Birthday party decor. 

Making my favorite sorbet. 

Very jolly.  And sweaty. 

Cooling off. 

Iris really likes cake. 

Craigslist score!  More on that later. 

Right now I'm suffering through one of the hardest weeks of the year.  You know, senior pranks (baby oil slickin' up the halls?!), rambunctious ninth graders, and vain attempts to keep those fifteen-year olds interested in The Taming of the Shrew.  Save me, Heath Ledger!

Hope your weekend was lovely, and that your week is full of happy things like handsome men singing on bleachers.  It's never not awesome.

Barbie Girl.

Hey!  Don't forget to head to my reviews page to enter to win the $100 HomeGoods gift card!  Just leave a comment and you're entered to win!  Shoot yeah!


Here's something that probably won't surprise you: I love Barbies.

Barbie, her kid sister Skipper, her [probably gay] boyfriend Ken, and her Island Fun ethnic friend Miko were my toys of choice in the late '80s.  MY GOD, how I loved to dress them and come up with twisted scenarios for them to act out!

Most of these scenes involved the ladies fighting over Ken.  It was a supply and demand kind of thing, and there was only one of him and there were like 12 of them.  Barbie and her gals had to turn a little slutty.  (It was very much like attending a liberal arts college.)  I would usually spend about two hours dressing Barbie and brushing her hair and setting up her house, only to climax with a sordid scene during which Barbie and Miko got in a big fight because Ken liked Miko more, and Barbie would slap Miko with her bent-elbow arm and then drive off in her Corvette.  And then Ken and Miko would strip down to nothing but their rubbery bodies and slap themselves together while making kissing noises.  It took about 2 hours of preparation for about 3 minutes of drama.

My friend Sloan and I playing Barbies in my closet.  Note the headless Barbie to the left.  

And the Osh-Kosh overall straps.  Oh, the eighties.

Later, I'd decide that Miko needed different arms because she wanted to slow dance with Ken (you know, after the hot sex), so I'd rip Barbie's head off of her body and put Miko's head on that bent-arm body.  As time passed, I had accidentally broken the neck piece that allowed the heads full rotation in almost every one of my dolls, so I had to smoosh their heads down.  So I had a bunch of tall, skinny, no-neck supermodels.  Oh well.  At least their clothes were cool.  And at least they could still go chill in the Hawaiian Hut.

My Barbie interest would ebb and flow.  In middle school my friend Krissy and I would go hide in her room and play with all of her Barbies.  Her parents were divorced and her mom spoiled her something rotten, so she had the dream house and boxes and boxes of clothes and cars and dozens of dolls.  We knew that we were too old to be playing with Barbies, but we didn't care because they were SO AWESOME!  And if you think that the plots of my late '80s Barbie play were awful, you should've heard what our mid '90s Barbies were up to (this was also during 90210's heyday).  Unfortunately, the content of these storylines is not blog appropriate.  Shooot.

Later, during college, I again became very into Barbies.  This time it wasn't so much for the playing, but more for the nostalgia.  So after a few birthdays and late-night shopping trips, I quickly found myself--again--the owner of a brood of Barbies.  They even featured part of my Barbie collection in the feature that our school newspaper did about our house on JMU Cribs.  (Which kind of deserves its own post.)

Fast forward.  I move to Savannah and grow up and get married.  And then I meet Iris, a little fashionista on whom I love to bestow gifts.  For Iris's second birthday, Cassie and I wanted so badly to buy her a Barbie.  But, no!  Ann, Iris's mom, was dead set against it, claiming that Barbies promote negative body image, and that Barbies are whores and so on.  Cassie and I persisted, later telling Ann that we would be buying Iris either a puppy or a Barbie for [birthday, Christmas, random Wednesday].  But Ann was so against Iris having Barbies that even our manipulative tactics were futile.

"Don't you dare buy my kid a stupid Barbie!"

You can imagine how aghast I was, then, when yesterday, at Iris's 5th birthday party, I saw Iris receive not one, BUT TWO (!!) Barbies.  AND ONE WAS FROM HER MOTHER!  And you can imagine Cassie's reaction when I emailed her these pictures.  There was lots of language that is also not blog appropriate.

Basically,  Cassie and I are now in a fight with Ann. And you know what Cassie and I do when we're in a fight with someone?  We go to Target.

Brace yourself for the Barbie-splosion!

This and That

Hey, before you do anything else, go to my reviews page and enter to win a $100 HomeGoods gift card!  All you have to do is enter a comment and you're entered to win!


1.  Cassie spends the night at our house once a week now so that she doesn't have to stay in a hotel when she comes to the SAV for work.   We call it Sleepover Tuesday, or ST.  Every week we say that this will be the week that we don't drink wine.  And then, inevitably, every week we find some reason that we need to drink wine (like, "Wine is delicious" or "I had to go to work today.")  So, with every ST, there seems to be a HW.  Shooooot.  This week, though--BECAUSE WE'RE AWESOME!--we managed to imbibe responsibly.  You know it's sad when the content of your email exchange during the day is just self-praise for not being hungover.

2.  I will never learn which ones are the high def channels.  Matt insists that they're actually easier to learn, but, hey, I'm an old dog.  And it wasn't terribly convincing when he tried to point out the difference between high def and non-high def by using MSNBC's Lockup.

3.  Also, who the hell watches Lockup?  Couldn't MSNBC make more money showing reruns of Friends or something?

4.  Slate is totally making me self-conscious about my overuse of the dash.  F you, Slate!  Just for that, I will keep reading you all day every day.  And I will use more dashes than ever.  And fragments.  (And parentheses.)

5.  I've been an ellipting fool lately.  It's a good thing, too, because I quit Weight Watchers a couple of weeks ago.  I figured that since I quit my second job, I didn't need to be spending $40/month just to feel more guilty about eating cake and ice cream.

6.  Seven more days of school with my kiddies!

7.  Brag time.  Totally whipped up a cake on the fly for Iris's pre-birthday celebration last night.  And it was, um, out of control delicious, and beautiful.  Cassie had the idea to swirl Iris's favorite colors in the batter, and then she made an i stencil for the top.  It was a completely last-minute decision to even make the cake, and it ended up being just lovely.  And we didn't have any birthday candles, but we did have a tall hot pink taper candle that Iris jammed into the cake.  Two years ago I didn't even know that vegetable shortening could go bad (it can, by the way, especially if it's been in your pantry for five years), and now I'm just baking a cake from scratch in less time than it takes to watch an episode of True Blood.  So proud!

Hope your Thursday is the bee's knees!  Thursday's going to be a doozy here.  I'm already thinking about my Friday afternoon nap.

Happy 5th Birthday, Iris!

Just wanted to wish a happy birthday to the funniest, most responsible, most neurotic, most fashionable five-year old on the planet.  Oh, and smart.  Did we mention smart?  Or, as Iris would say, cerebral.

Hope your birthday is full of kisses and cake and fun.  And new clothes and more cake.  And then, maybe, some more cake.  And then some shoes.  And dresses.

And then more cake.

Just remember, you don't get to drink wine until you're six.

xoxo, little lady

Oh, What a Wonderful Weekend.

Um, are you ready to see way too many pictures?  I AM!

Man oh man it's been a wonderful couple of days!

Really, it's been pretty great since we came back from our vacation.  Busy busy, but fantastic.

The only hiccup was that on Thursday night our heater tried to kill us when it switched from air conditioning to as-hot-as-it-could-possibly-go heat.  Seriously.  Hot.  Heat.  Pumping into our house for hours and hours before we figured out we'd have to cut it off at the power source if we didn't want to bake in our own home. (I might have screamed and cried.)  But it's fixed now and we're not dead and nothing in the house was scorched or otherwise ruined, so we're gee-tee-gee.

In other awesomepants awesome news.

My hydrangeas are blooming!  I didn't kill them after all.

Mitch went on a Mitch-venture.  (a.k.a., "His irresponsible parents forgot that they let him outside to roam the neighborhood.")

We went to see Toy Story 3 in Forsyth Park with our buds.  There were kids and babies and glo-bracelets.  And there was wine.  (Because we live in an awesome place that has no open container law.  And, yes, that is part of the reason we moved here.)

I made a delicious cake.  Make this cake.  Make it right now.

And I made another cake that seemed like it was going to be great at first, but ended up being, for a host of reasons, a little bit less successful.

 Mother F.

And we attended Opal's blue-themed birthday party.  And it was fun and delicious.  Like, really fun, and really delicious.

You still haven't made it?  What's wrong with you already?!

And there was Kan Jam, which is insanely fun.

And there were rasterbated pictures.  Sounds dirty.  It's not dirty.

And then there was a little more cake eating.

And there was beer drinking atop a Volvo.

And fancy flower arranging.

And scooting.

 And general adventuring.

And sister eating.

And mind-over-mattering. (Egg allergy be damned!)

I hope that you had as lovely couple of days.  What'd you do?  What'd you eat?



UPDATE:  Also, apparently Bin Laden is dead.  Shoot yeah!  I hated that guy.  Glad to be talking about him in the past tense.