Ice Cream Stars {Flop}

In anticipation of the August Virtual Book Club, we've been reading lots of books by Kevin Henkes.  One of the books that we really like is Wemberly's Ice-Cream Star.   Wemberly wants to share her ice cream star with her stuffed friend Petal.  She lets the ice cream melt into two bowls and they enjoy eating ice cream soup together.

I thought it would be fun to make some ice cream stars and then let them melt into ice cream soup. I even had star-shaped ice cube trays that I bought from Walmart around the 4th of July.  I found a recipe for ice cream molds here, which I adapted.  We were all set to go.

I'm sure the idiocy of my plan will be obvious to you as soon as you see the recipe, but for some reason I charged ahead and never once realized that if you want ice cream to melt, the last thing you want to put in it is Jello.  Duh.  Anyway, here's what we did in case you want ice cream stars that won't melt, which I guess in most other situations would be ideal.

We dissolved a small package of strawberry Jello in one cup boiling water and then added one cup of vanilla ice cream.  We used this mixture to fill one of the ice cube trays.

After we filled one tray, we added two drops of blue food coloring to the remaining mixture to make it purple and filled the other tray.

To add insult to injury I didn't read the recipe carefully and put these in the freezer (it's ice cream, right?) and they were supposed to go in the refrigerator.  Once they were frozen, they were really hard to get out of the tray!  Eventually we used a toothpick to loosen them from the sides and they came out.  At least Drew got some fine motor practice in there. 

And while they never melted into soup, they tasted pretty good so it wasn't a complete flop.  But the moral of this story is if you want to do a reenactment of Wemberly's Ice-Cream Star, don't try to get all fancy.  Just melt some ice cream and refreeze it into star shapes. 

Linking to Read Explore Learn, Crafty Moms Share, Crazy for Crust