Bready Or Not

I grew up in an ice-cream-loving family. There were always multiple flavors of ice cream in the freezer, sometimes as many as five. And there was always a batch of my mom’s secret-recipe famous hot fudge sauce to put on top. The way I differed from the rest of my family was in the whipped cream department. The incredulity in my mom’s voice has not faded in the slightest; to this day, she marvels at how I didn’t like whipped cream as a child. When I was four years old, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. As I got older, I started taking it in small doses, a tiny little puff on top of my ice cream and hot fudge sauce. Never as much as everyone else, especially my brother, who was my opposite in this sense (the ice cream should be completely blanketed). Mind you, this was whipped cream from a can, but it was real whipped cream, not Cool Whip (my mom wouldn’t have stood for that).

When I got older, I discovered homemade whipped cream for the first time. And that might be the first time I actually liked it. It’s so different! I have been drinking my coffee with heavy cream lately (left over from my goat ricotta project), and last night I realized I could be drinking my coffee with whipped cream, so that’s what I decided to do today.

All you really need to make whipped cream is a jar to shake; but if you don’t have a ridiculous amount of time to kill and don’t want your hand to fall off, you’ll need hand beaters or a stand mixer. There are also fill-your-own whipped cream makers, similar to the kind you buy Reddi-wip in. I have one of these, but I’ll be darned if I was able to use it more than a handful of times before it stopped working and I couldn’t figure out why. Someday, maybe I’ll get it working again. For now, the stand mixer it is.

The great part of making your own whipped cream is that you can easily sweeten or flavor it any way you want. I decided to go deluxe with maple syrup.

This is just an ounce or two of cream. That’s what I had left. You don’t need much, if you’re just going to top one cup of coffee, but you do need enough so that your mixer whisk has something to grab onto. I whipped it a little while before adding the maple syrup, because I was afraid that the extra liquid at the beginning would prevent the cream from whipping up. This may be completely unfounded, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. I didn’t measure the maple syrup, but it was probably two or three teaspoons.

By the way, if you’re using a stand mixer, keep a close eye on it; if you leave your cream in there too long, you’ll end up with butter! The change can happen very suddenly. The more cream you’re whipping, the longer it will take to whip up. This amount whips up very quickly; if you’re doing a large batch, it’ll take several minutes, but once the volume starts building up, it’ll go pretty quickly.

This is looking good.

Yum…but, it needs something.

A sprinkling of cinnamon! Perfect.

I am drinking this now. Don’t even know if I’ll be able to finish it. Maybe that’s because when the first dollop of whipped cream melted, I added more.  And then more. It’s delicious! But yes, very rich for the morning. More of a dessert….mmmmm…and yet, I still have some left over. Hmm. Maybe I’ll save it to have on ice cream tonight.