Recently I decided to try something new for the monthly farmers markets - and I must say that it has been working very well in my favor so far.
I dusted off my old freezie maker which I somehow only remembered now - at the end of our summer, but decided to give this a go anyway, and I ordered in some soft serve ice cream, at first I made some ice cream freezies, just plain vanilla, strawberry and chocolate ice-cream, but then I thought 'why should the kids have all the fun?'
I started playing around with different flavours that could go well with ice cream - and Dom Pedro's popped into mind. Off I went to the bottlestore, and bought a few bottles of booze; coffee liqueur, whiskey, rum and vodca to be more precise, and from that I ended up with five different flavors of dom pedro Ice lollies - my favorite has to be the coffee...
For those of you that might be wondering how freezies can be made from home - here is my very simple home made freezie machine, that has helped me out quite a bit for sports events when my daughter was younger, and later on became quite a nice way to supplement income from home.
Basically all it is, is a stable stand that is balanced enough to carry a 25L drum at the top (I will elaborate on that shortly) this is four pieces of square tubing welded onto a face plate, with a small industrial heat sealer mounted onto that.
Below the heat sealer, we grinded a slot into the face plate and with a wingnut we attached a base plate into the slot - this plate as such can adjust in order to gauge the length between itself and the heat sealer - this allows you to easily manage the length that you want your freezies to be. (in my case I filled my plastic tubing with 100ml of water, placed it at the mouth of the heat sealer, and then adjusted the base plate so that the freezie rests on it, so now if I start filling the plastic tubing with the ice cream I know that when it rests on the base plate, it will be 100ml where I seal it off.)
The drum on the top of the structure is just as simple - it is basically just a 25L drum which we have modified by fitting a simple ball valve to the base, and from that we ran a short length of pvc pipe.
How this contraption works is so simple, first you'd need to get some plastic tubing. This will then be fed over the protruding PVC pipe, in a similar way that you would feed your casing over a sausage maker. Then you would fill your drum with whatever you would like to make your freezies with - In this case it was a soft serve ice-cream and liquor mix, of course at this point your tap at the ball valve would be shut.
Then you would seal off the bottom end of the plastic sleeving, and slowly open up the tap, allowing the mixture to fill the plastic sleeving at a pace that works for you. As the sleeve fills up and settles on the base plate, you seal off the top end of the tube.
The heat sealer, seals off the top of the first and the bottom of the second, then sealing it a second time separates the two from each other - as easy as that. And BAM - you have a freezie.
Making them is a lot faster than you could imagine, to give you an example - I can easily make about 100 of these in under 15 minutes. And that is a great thing - because this ended up being a great hit at the markets, and I have even been getting a whole lot of orders from return clients.
The very first market I sold these at - I was sold out on the dom pedro range before the market was even finished, I returned home with just a handful of plain ice cream freezies - guess the adults were having a lot more fun than the kids...
