Ice cream disaster

I have had my first ice cream disaster.

If you're wondering what an ice cream disaster is, well, it's when you melt some snickers bars, and they don't melt properly, slightly solidify, and when you (in desperation) drop them into the ice cream maker as it's churning, they don't break up. Instead, you end up with vanilla ice cream with three large chunks of frozen snickers. Not my plan at all!

My plan had been quite simply. Buy some snickers, melt some snickers and either add it to the ice cream base before I put it into the maker, or pour it in (once cooled) while the maker is churning.

I should have realised, when the caramel from the snickers started boiling, that it was not going to go to plan. These snickers are "special" so they have no nougat, which means they should have been easier to melt. Nougat is really hard to melt (I know this from experience- it takes ages). So the caramel started boiling, and I thought "whoops, don't want burned caramel" and turned it down. Right down to Low and left it there. And it melted quite quickly, really, though never to a really runny state. I admit, I might have been impatient, but it was doing this weird chunky melted thing. So I took it off the stove for 5 minutes to cool before I added it to the mixture (I was going to beat it in with my hand beater). But in that 5 minutes (2 chapters of Pride and Prejudice), it solidified. Back onto the stove, and nothing doing. I added extra chocolate in so there would be more chocolate to caramel, but that didn't help either. And I have melted Mars Bars before, so I know that this can work.

But it didn't.

In the end, we just added the chocolate straight in, in the hope that somehow it would break up in the cream. Unfortunately, it didn't. And the ice cream didn't set in the maker either - probably because of having something quite warm added to it.

In theory I was meant to get a gorgeous chocolate/caramel swirl through my ice cream. With nuts. In practice, I got some chunks of frozen snickers. With nuts.