Kitchen Wizardry with the Ice Cream Ball

Apparently, it’s summer and nothing goes with hot weather quite like ice cream (and if you’ve not had any sunshine, ice cream will help cheer you up!) Throw a game of catch into the equation and you’ve got the perfect park-based pastime.

Step in, the Ice Cream Ball from Firebox.

The Ice Cream Ball, £26.49, allows you to make your own ice cream without the need for any power sockets, so you could use it on camping trips or at festivals.  Put your ingredients in one end of the ball, ice and rock salt in the other, and then start tossing!

Not too violently though, nobody wants a smashed up gadget and mess all over your carpet.

Twenty minutes of this gets you a pint of ice cream. If the texture/consistency isn’t to your liking you can simply roll it around a bit more. It seems like magic but it’s even better: it’s science.

Here comes the science bit!

The ingenious device uses the rock salt (don’t worry, this doesn’t go into your ice cream!) and ice to produce a substance with a freezing point below that of water (just ice would make the process too slow and reach an equilibrium before it completed). Therefore, the ice/salt mixture must draw heat from it’s surroundings to melt and therefore lower the temperature of your ice cream mixture quickly to freeze it into a delicious treat.

Who knew the Second Law of Thermodynamics could be so fun?

I’ve wanted to make home-made ice cream for ages but am frankly just too lazy, so this gadget offers quite the creative solution. It also gives you a chance to play around with ice cream flavours; it’s basically an experiment and you owe it to science to do it.

That’s an order.

Ice Cream Ball

Tamsin Worrad

Tamsin is a crafty, geeky blogger, who can be found tweeting, blogging on her blog Miss Believer, and writing about tea over on splashofmilk.wordpress.com

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