Melted Ice Cream Bread

When I first saw something on a homemaking blog about melted ice cream bread, I was confused. Why on God's green earth would you spend money on perfectly good ice cream if your only intention was to melt it to make weird bread? Aren't there enough wonderful quick bread recipes out there?

Then my boys were watching the show None of the Above, where the host sets up an experiment and you're supposed to choose the result from a list of possibilities. Then they explain the science behind what happened. My boys have watched so many episodes of Mythbusters that they can usually guess the answer, but I'm the only one who knew what would happen if you mixed flour and melted ice cream and put it in the microwave.

It works the way it does because ice cream contains everything that's in bread except for the flour. At least that's how my nine-year-old explained it to me. So we headed for the grocery store to buy the cheapest brand of ice cream I could find and some self rising flour, then checked the Internet for recipes.

We wound up using 3 cups of melted strawberry ice cream and 1 1/2 cups of flour and baking it at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. The instructions I was following said 30 minutes, but I left it in until a sharp knife came out clean. Ice cream bread should follow the same rules as banana bread, right?

It worked. Sort of. I really wouldn't recommend it as more than a fun science project for the kids because it didn't taste all that good and there are so many really good quick bread recipes out there to try. According to the articles I read online, you should use the best quality ice cream that you can find, with the fewest artificial ingredients. I think I'll just bake my next loaf of quick bread from scratch!

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