This Week's Featured Dessert Recipes: Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream (custard based and low sugar recipes) and Gluten Free Chocolate Cupcakes

I've been wanting to make homemade ice cream for a while now. Primarily because I love ice cream and I know it has a ton of sugar in it. So I recently bought an ice cream maker with the intention to make low-sugar frozen desserts. Just made my first batch today and was very pleased with the results. I made a full sugar custard based recipe from: http://www.joyofbaking.com/VanillaIceCream.html
I didn't have white sugar, so I made mine with brown. The only issues I had were that the ice cream was not frozen enough. However since I have never used my machine before, I can't tell if it was due to my substitution or the ice cream maker.

Here are my results!
The beautiful custard I could eat even without freezing yum.

And the ice cream...

For those of you without ice cream makers, I found a wonderful low sugar recipe from Anktangle: http://www.anktangle.com/2013/03/homemade-ice-cream-without-sugar.html


As for other adventures in sweet making, I made gluten free chocolate cupcakes from Double Cream Single Sugar: http://www.doublecreamsinglesugar.com/2010/09/chocolate-mochi-cake.html

This recipe requires mochiko (glutinous rice flour available at most asian food stores) which I had in my pantry after experimenting with making mochi (very difficult!). I added some chocolate chips in my cakes. They were very gooey and chocolaty. Would have parred well with the homemade ice cream :)