Eating Treats (Homemade Froyo!)

If you follow me on Twitter, you’d be forgiven if you think that I eat only junk food.  I mean, just last week I posted this photo.

Yep. Homemade chips aka the best French Fries ever.  Also the first ever time I have made these at home!

In keeping with the “bad food” theme, I have been posting a lot of ice cream recipes on here recently.  That is because I’ve been participating in the Kavey Eats Bloggers Scream for Ice Cream challenge.  Every month Kavey chooses a theme, and bloggers join in and create something that matches the theme, and then post their recipes.

In September I made a little investment in an ice cream machine, deciding that if I was going to eat ice cream I’d rather eat ice cream that I MADE.  I’d rather know EXACTLY what was in the stuff I chose to consume.  Participating in Kavey’s challenge has been a great opportunity for me to learn more about making ice cream and to experiment with new recipes and ideas.  In the months of the challenges I’ve completely migrated away from store bought ice creams.

And I’ve learned a lot about ice cream.  Especially how much sugar is in it.  I mean, my salted caramel had damn near close to 400g total sugar (if you count the caramel that I made scattered on the ice cream).  That is about a pound of sugar – like a whole entire small bag that you get at the supermarket!  In a small Haagen Daz type of container!  How is that even possible??  Well, it is.  Trust me it is!

Anyway, my point is that by making your own, if you have a vice, you suddenly become a lot more conscious about what exactly is in said vice.  You plan out when you want to consume said vice.  You become a lot more aware and a lot more mindful with eating.  For me the “make my own” approach forces me to think twice before having a “treat”. 

Treat: Noun. (1) A sweet, biscuit, or other item of sweet food. (2)Something that gives one great pleasure.
Source: Oxford Dictionary Online

By making my own, my treats really are treats.  Not just the automatic “oh I think I’ll have ice cream after dinner, again” defaults that treats seem to have become these days.  It is so easy just to get into those habits, isn’t it?!

Making frozen treats is not very difficult – or it doesn’t have to be.  For example, even if you don’t have an ice cream maker you can blend the ingredients, semi freeze, take out the mix and blend until smooth, refreeze, and repeat.

Although I love making absolutely everything “from scratch” – measuring each ingredient out, creating my treats from each separate individual component into a final end product – every now and then even I take some shortcuts.  Making frozen yoghurt for me is just such a case.

My recipe for frozen yoghurt is just SO EASY.  It cannot get any easier.

Ingredients:

Approximately 350g of the jam/jelly/compote of your choice (I used Bonne Maman)
450g (one large container) of greek yoghurt

Instructions:

1. Warm the container of jam over a hob to soften it, about 2 minutes.  If you are using compote, skip this step as compote does not have that solid consistency.
2. Stir the entire container of greek yoghurt into your jam or compote.  Mix thoroughly to evenly distribute the fruit flavour.
3. Freeze in your ice cream machine (or semifreeze-blend-repeat about three times to get a smooth ice cream texture)
4. Enjoy.

See?  Super easy.  I have tried this method so far with strawberry compote, strawberry jam, and cherry compote.  I have also stirred through dark chocolate buttons or finely chopped pieces of fresh fruit into the semi-frozen ice cream (before popping it away in the freezer for storage).  I can tell you that the above method for frozen yoghurt is pretty much fail safe.  It yields about two pints (Ben & Jerry’s size containers) of ice cream.

I hear you thinking – what about knowing how much sugar you are using?  Aren’t you losing that understanding with your shortcut?

I always read labels, and after making a few different varieties of sorbet and ice cream I know how much 50g, 150g, 200g, 300g, and 400g of sugar looks and feels like. 

To put this into perspective, each scoop of ice cream made with 50g of added sugar will contain about 1 teaspoon of sugar.  So when making cherry frozen yoghurt with the Bonne Maman cherry compote, this was the sugar content.  The resulting frozen yoghurt from that had a pleasant pure yoghurt and tart cherry flavour, which I liked.

When making frozen yoghurt with a container of jam, jam is much sweeter than compote, and each small jar has about 225g of sugar.  So about four times the amount in compote.  The strawberry frozen yoghurt was distinctly sweet – there was no sourness or hint of plain yoghurt in the end result.  It is very tasty, as you can imagine.  But you are having about four teaspoons of sugar in each serving – knowing that really does focus the mind.

Ice cream. It is a treat. Enjoy.

PS – if you would like to see more of my “healthy” recipes, I’m happy to post those more regularly, just let me know.  I’ll be trying out some new ideas for quinoa salad this weekend so that may be the next recipe you find on here.  Also, feel free to head over to the collaborative baking site I am a part of – 52 Weeks of Baking – for some oven-inspired ideas.