Today was the first time I used the frosting based recipe to make scoopable ice cream. I have always used it for soft served ice cream. 

Prior to today, I have always made the shortening based ice cream. 

The frosting based ice cream is easier to make and I think easier to get the barking to work. But, it dries out really fast, which kind of defeats the purpose of having so much extra time using fake ice cream over real ice cream. 

Don’t get me wrong, it still buys you time, but not a lot, within 10 minutes or so, it starts to dry out. You could probably get 20 minutes out of it before it looks obviously dry. 

If you’re covering it with lots of syrup, nuts and whipped cream, it shouldn’t matter. 

The shortening based ice cream doesn’t dry out very fast. You can get literally a couple of hours out of it before it starts to look bad. 

It is harder to mix and harder to get the consistency right, though. 

I think for a commercial food shoot, I would choose the shortening based recipe, but for editorial photos, I think the frosting based recipe will work for most people better. 

Now, I have other tricks to make it look more real. If you notice, there is some ‘wetness’ on the ice cream. Just making the ice cream isn’t the only thing to do to get that realistic look!

I will do a video, where I will show you how to make it and style it for camera. Sorry for the cliff hanger. 🙂

Look for that soon!