Hacking our way to frozen victory

There we were, sitting in Neeti’s room and scrolling through YouTube videos when suddenly we both realized we were craving ice cream. What better way to simultaneously satisfy our hunger and complete our newspaper story than to make ice cream in five minutes?

Luckily, the YouTube channel “5-Minute Crafts KIDS” came to our rescue with a homemade ice cream hack, and we had all the ingredients! We dashed to the kitchen and grabbed the milk, cream, vanilla extract, sugar, salt, two Ziploc bags and ice. 

Here’s how it worked: One Ziploc bag with all the mixed ice cream ingredients was placed inside the other Ziploc bag with a salt and ice concoction and then shaken vigorously for five minutes.

The first problem was that the entire process was clearly going to take longer than five minutes. 5-Minute Crafts KIDS had clickbaited us into watching their deceptive video! We felt scammed. 

The next problem was the ice. We managed to blend all our ice cream ingredients with no issues, but the ice was another story. We knelt by Neeti’s freezer, our hands frozen and in pain, desperately trying to break apart a block of ice into the chips that we needed.

 After a solid six minutes of hand torture, we finally had enough ice to shake our vanilla milk into ice cream. Don’t ask us why shaking ice and salt freezes a liquid into a solid. Our AP Chemistry test two days ago on phase changes traumatized us too much to be able to comprehend this colligative property. 

Five more minutes of hand-freezing later, we were surprised to find chunky but solid ice cream in the Ziploc. But how did it taste?

We were actually impressed by our ice cream because it tasted pretty good for a 14-minute creation. But as tasty as it was, it quickly melted into a depressing puddle of milk. 

So much for our new Food Network show.