Remember the strawberry ice cream? Turns out it gets hard as a freaking rock in the freezer, over time increasing in hardness to something resembling "diamond". I tried valiantly to chip off bits to eat, but only succeeded in shaving a fine layer of pink fuzz off the top.

Solution: Ice cream cubes.

First, get your ice cream container into a hot tap water bath. Fill a big pan or the sink with hot water to come well up the sides of the container. If you have a really tight-fitting lid you can even immerse it, but I wouldn't try that unless you're really sure disaster will not ensue. Let the ice cream container sit in hot water, replacing water as necessary to maintain warmth, until the ice cream loosens enough to move around in one big block. Then take the container out, turn it upside down (over your hand or a cutting board), and catch the block of ice cream as it falls out.

Now it is time for knives.

Get a good, serious, big knife out and immerse it in/run it under hot water. Give it a minute or two. Then, when the blade is warm, start cutting up your ice cream. You'll probably need to rewarm your blade between every cut or two, as ice cream is cold and hard. You can cut it into whatever dimensions you want. I cut about inch and a half wide slices, then cut crosswise through them to make rough cubes.

Now you can have a bowlful of ice cream cubes! Since you've drastically increased the surface area of the ice cream, these cubes will get soft enough to eat much faster than the huge, immovable block.

The rest of the cubes don't even need to go back into the regular container. They can go into a ziploc bag and thus get shoved wherever there is space in the freezer. Yay flexible ice cream storage!

With the sudden huge space available in our freezer, we could even make MORE frozen business! Double yay!

I poked around The Internet and decided to make Clotilde's David Lebovtiz's dark chocolate sorbet.

I accidentally got semisweet instead of bittersweet chocolate, but somehow the sorbet turned out fine anyway. The best part was that the entire thing was non-dairy. I mean, I like ice cream and everything, but I would pick fruit and no cream, thank you, any day. The same goes for chocolate. Ok fine, I also like milk chocolate, just not white chocolate. GROSS. But dark chocolate is so clearly preferable that most other things go straight out the window.

So we made this sorbet. It was so delicious and so transitory that we have only two pictures, both of the machine in motion.

The rest is gone.

Sometime there will have to be an experiment to replicate the best candy on earth in iced form. This would be Ritter Sport's dark chocolate bar with rum, hazelnuts, and raisins. I can see this happening in the very near future, somehow, especially as the rum would keep such a creation from becoming so hard as to be chiselable.