How to trick youself into eating ice milk instead of sinfully rich ice cream

This all began as a way to eat the jarred cherries from a previous post. They would be incorporated into a delicious batch of knock-off Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream. The ice cream recipe used was buttermilk-based. The head notes for the recipe promised frozen heaven in a bowl. Well, we'll see about that.

I had actually forgotten to buy buttermilk, but lucky for me, I was able to pull a box of powdered buttermilk out of the pantry. How old is it? No date, but when I asked if anyone knew, the response was, "You're not going to use that, are you? It's really really old." This coming from someone who had no problem with me using egg yolks that have been in the freezer since last Christmas cookie season (we'll get to the egg yolks in a minute). Which ingredient ended up causing problems? I'll give you a hint: not the buttermilk. Maybe if the egg yolks weren't shoved in the freezer in a bowl with nothing but saran wrap to protect them, it would have been a different story, but then, hindsight is 20/20.

Into the mix went the aforementioned egg yolks. Although they had been transferred from freezer to refrigerator a few days before I made this, they were still sort of solid. And by sort of solid, I guess I mean really really solid. It did fleetingly cross my mind not to use them, but hey, you've gotta take chances once in a while, right?

So, using the old egg yolks, questionable powdered buttermilk, and remaining ingredients (all of which were appropriate for use in a non-vintage recipe), I attempted to make the custard which would then be frozen into ice cream.

Well, besides cream, it's the egg yolks that make ice cream sooooo good. However, although I did make the custard with 12 egg yolks they all sort of solidified into tiny chunks. It looked like a big curdled mass. Sadly, all that creamy goodness had to be strained out of the ice cream :(

But, still I persevered--into the ice cream went vintage jarred cherries. A little scary looking, but they did taste fine.

There are also some vintage chocolate chips in there that you can kind of see.

And here's the final product. How did it taste? Well, let's just say, it's not my best batch of ice cream. No creamy goodness was detectable. Basically, I ended up with vanilla ice milk with chocolate chips and cherries. I could have just left out the egg yolks and saved myself from having to spend 15 minutes trying to scub egg yolk chunks out of the strainer I used. Maybe if I had used the yolks for an omelette, they would have been fine, but ice cream was a bad idea. So sad...

Moral of the story? Old powdered buttermilk = good. Old solidified egg yolks = bad.