Remember that ice cream maker that I was so excited to get?

Well, the honeymoon ended pretty damn quick. Turns out, it might be useful to me at all, and I might just end up returning it, which would be depressing.

You see, it turns out that it does not make slushies out of some sugar free products. And I only found this out after I had read almost the entire manual.

Right there, in the recipes for slushies (slurpees, whatever) it says, at the very end, “Do not use with sugar free products.”

And it does not say why.

Needless to say, I was angry and confused when I read this, so I tried Googling around to find out why. And a lot of people seem to think that you just plain cannot use anything other than real actual sugar while making ice cream. Period.

The sugar free stuff that you can buy at the store is made with exotic emulsifiers in order to combat the fact that apparently nothing binds the ice cream together like sugar does.

This would render the unit completely useless for my purposes. The whole reason I wanted an ice cream maker was so that I could make sugar free desserts for myself. I had ice cream dreams of making all my favorite kinds of ice cream and slushies and sorbets and gelatos (gelati?) with Splenda instead of sugar, and be able to enjoy the sweet life that everyone who is not diabetic takes for granted.

But the jury is still out. I have not been able to cash my monthly cheque yet, so I have not been able to pick up the proper ingredients for home made ice cream^[1] and tried to make it with Splenda yet. That will determine the fate of the machine.

If I can make ice cream with Splenda, despite the naysayers online, then the machine stays. If not, it goes back to Future Shop and I sigh a big, heavy, creamy sigh and go back to making bread.

My experiments so far :

1) Generic Diet Lemon Lime Soda. Did not work at all. Formed a layer of ice around the inner edge of the freezer bowl that the scraper could not scrape off. That was some seriously tough ice. Had to turn the machine off because it was making very unhappy grinding, scraping sounds. Total fail.

2) Cranberry juice. This was specifically mentioned in the slushies recipe in the book, and it should have worked. But results were inconclusive. The juice began to slush up, but never got more than slightly slushy. I might have interfered with the process too early, though. So I will try again without touching the unit for a full half hour, then see what we have.

Experiment 3 will be lemonade made with water, bottled lemon juice, and Splenda. The freezer bowl for the ice cream maker should be fully frozen again by now, and the lemonade has been in the fridge long enough for it to be fully cold. I am primed and ready.

In fact, I think I will go get that started right now. Live blogging! I am so hip.

All right! It is a go. Even when it is running smoothly, it is a fairly loud machine. Apparently, that is simply an inevitable part of making an electric motor strong enough to push a sturdy plastic blade through a freezing liquid for half an hour.

Those are not going to be quiet.

The principle is pretty simple, actually. The rotation of the bowl pushes the blade through the liquid. The liquid freezes on the inner edge of the freezer bowl and is scraped off by the blade. The blade is angled so that what it scrapes off is pushed off the blade in to the middle of the bowl. Thus, the final product accumulates in the bowl and the edge of the bowl never develops enough frozen stuff to clog up the blade. Simple, elegant, and effective. I love that kind of thing.

Hopefully, in 22 minutes or so, I will have delicious lemon slush to consume, and a reason to keep the ice cream maker. In theory, there is no reason that Splenda should not work exactly like sugar as far as binding goes. It is, after all, just reverse sugar, sugar with the atoms arranged in a mirror image way from normal sugar.

So in theory, it should behave just like sugar, except that it does not fit in your body’s digestive receptors, and is therefore not digested.

Sounds like the perfect solution, right? Fools your taste buds but not your stomach. The ideal diet product. Does not even cause anal leakage.

But it turns out that in a lot of cases, the sugar is doing a lot more than sweetening your product. It is reacting chemically with the other ingredients, and that might not work the same backwards.

For instance, I cannot substitute Splenda for the small amount of sugar used in my bread machine recipes, because the yeast eats the sugar in order to produce the gas that leavens the bread, and yeast can’t digest Splenda either.

And for some reason that I can’t understand, Splenda does not work with Kool-Aid either. With all the Kool-Aid I have drunk in my life (mostly as a kid), I never thought that the Kool-Aid powder somehow chemically reacted to the sugar I used.

Oh well, perhaps the problem is simply that it takes a lot more elbow grease to make Splenda dissolve into water than sugar. The problem was that the two things, Kool aid powder and Splenda, did not merge to make Kool-Aid.

It just tasted like raw Koolaid powder and cheap sugar.

I will have to try again, and really give it a good stirring. I heart Kool-Aid muchly.

Well, my lemonade experiment is almost done, I better go check on things.

Wish me luck!