Valentine Ice Cream Has To Be Pink

Anyone who can resist a Valentine's Day ice cream has a will of iron! Let's face it most of us look for any excuse to eat ice cream and if there's a special occasion around the corner we will make the most of it. Valentine's Day is associated with love and the color most associated with love is pink.

Pink ice cream sandwiches for Valentine's Day
made by my friend Barbara

Pink ice cream on Valentine's Day is perfect. Giving a pink ice cream treat to a loved one helps get the message of love across loud and clear and even if you just want to give a Valentine's treat out of friendship or just a bit of fun, pink ice cream is still probably the best choice.

Pink ice cream of course usually strawberry but it doesn't have to be ... I made a fabulous pink rhubarb sorbet ice cream. Here is the recipe

If after all I've said you don't fancy pink ice cream then here are some fabulous ice cream flavors you can try making at home using my tried and tested recipes .....
Rhubarb & Custard
Rocky Road
Creme Brulee Ice Cream

My rocky road ice cream

Ice Cream Freezers - Size Matters!

If you love to eat ice cream, irrespective of whether you make homemade ice cream or just buy tubs from well known ice cream maker brands, you have to keep it properly stored. Hence your freezer, if it's working correctly, can be your best friend.

Most household freezers can accommodate your general frozen foods such as bread, fish, meat and a few ready-made meals whilst still having a little space left for a couple of tubs of ice cream. But what if you want more than a couple of tubs in storage? What if you're planning on giving a party where ice cream is on the menu? Or you might be planning to make some ice cream sculptures which can sometimes require several tubs of different ice cream colors (red = strawberry, brown = chocolate etc). 

Ice cream sculpture using different ice creams

Then again, you and your family might simply have different preferences when it comes to ice cream flavors - vanilla for Mum, mint choc chip for Dad, banana ice cream for the kids, etc - so you need to keep several tubs in storage for whenever they fancy a quick, tasty dessert.

So what do you do? Empty the normal food from the freezer and stock up just on ice cream? Nope, whilst it might be tempting it's a tad too radical a step! The best option is to consider buying a small ice cream freezer that you keep solely for ice cream storage. It's something I've been thinking of for a while but have yet to get around to doing - maybe because it would tempt me to have more ice cream in the house on a regular basis as opposed to just knowing I stock up on it only when there's room in my main freezer!

Thinking about all of this made me question how the big commercial ice cream makers store their ice cream. After all, once it's produced in frozen form it has to stored at the right temperature whilst awaiting distribution and also during transit to the final destination of supermarkets and stores. In reading up on the subject I came across an interesting article by a cold rooms specialist who listed in their case studies the story of how they had been involved in the construction of one of the biggest industrial panel structures ever built in the UK - a fully automated freezer warehouse where Unilever's logistics people store/transfer pallets of ice cream.

Example of warehouse pallets (Finland)
courtesy of Wikipedia

The size of the UK freezer warehouse build was massive at over 100 metres wide and 300 metres long, measuring up to over 1million m3 in total. Imagine how many pallets of ice cream you could get in there! That's one BIG ice cream freezer if ever there was one, providing a convincing argument for an extra little freezer at home just for ice cream not being such an indulgence after all :)