Sugar-Free Chocolate Ice-cream

The girls are working through Kitchen Chemistry for school. Today, the lesson was making ice-cream. Since we've been on a sugar fast, this was going to be tricky. Since we can have xylitol, I figured we could make it work. The girls also wanted to do chocolate ice-cream. In the past, the only way we've done chocolate ice-cream was to use homemade chocolate sauce and since that uses sugar (and we didn't have any in the house), I had to come up with something different. I used our traditional ice-cream recipe as the base, but had to guess on the amount of xylitol and cocoa powder. The recipe I used is below.

As for the chemistry part of it, the girls looked at temperature differences and how the ice-cream changed from when we put it in the ice-cream freezer and when we took it out. They discovered that ice had a temperature of 5 degrees F. After layering the salt and ice, the temperature quickly dropped to below 0 degrees. Since my thermometer didn't go below 0, we don't know how low it actually went. We discussed why the ice-cream mixture needed a lower temperature than water to freeze. All in all, it was a great lesson.

Sugar-Free Chocolate Ice-cream

1 1/2 cups xylitol
2/3 cup baking cocoa
dash of salt
2-3 teaspoons of vanilla
enough milk to fill the freezer

Mix all together in batches in a blender. Add to freezer. (We use a 6-qt ice-cream maker). Layer ice and salt and turn on until done. Enjoy!