Lesson #155: County Fair & Creamy Strawberry Ice Cream

I haven't posted any new recipes in a while, but that's only because I've been super busy. I've spent the last week at our local county fair! My brother runs a few concession trailers at the fair, so I've spent the week making soft-serve ice cream cones and root beer floats :)

In addition to working at the booth, I also entered a few baking/cooking projects. Check out my ribbons:

Pretty exciting, huh? Here's the breakdown on what I won:
1st place: Creamy Strawberry Ice Cream
1st place: Milk Chocolate Ice Cream
1st place: Buckeye Ice Cream
1st place: BBQ Pork Sandwich with Apple Slaw
2nd place: White Bread (I made this recipe with no cinnamon swirl)
2nd place: Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

Last Sunday was the special ice cream day at the fair. Since we LOVE homemade ice cream in our house, I decided to enter all four categories of ice creams (vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and novelty). We could watch the local county people judge the ice creams, then they announced the winners, and you could sample all the ice creams. I think that sampling was my favorite part!

I tried a new strawberry ice cream recipe which was chock full of fresh strawberries and amazingly creamy. The chair of the culinary committee told me that she liked it so much she was going to try a variation of the recipe herself (substituting raspberries for strawberries and adding dark chocolate chunks.....sounds good to me!).

Here's a picture of a spoonful of strawberry ice cream right after I churned it and packed it up to go to the fair. We've already made a second batch at home :)

LESSON LEARNED: Use the freshest strawberries you can find for the recipe. It will make a big difference!

Recipe for Creamy Strawberry Ice Cream