Stay cool, my friends.

If you've been following the weather lately, you've heard the daily reports of record-breaking heat and storm-ravaged regions without power. Both headlines happen to be overlap in my Mid-Atlantic home.

In the three years I've lived in the greater DC area, I have witnessed Snowpocalypse, earthquakes, record-breaking heat, and storms of all types. Last year's hurriquake inspired my pantry survival tips post, and I had to check my stock of bottled water again during last week's events. Fortunately, I was one of the Northern Virginians spared by the inopportune power outages which coincided with the hottest week of the year. Besides the obvious reasons, I was lucky to keep power because it allowed me to make a few batches of ice cream inspired by the heat.

I love ice cream. Sorbets, custards, gelati, Dove bars, Klondike bars, mix-ins, smush-ins -- I love it all. I love ice cream so much that when I was nine years old on a trip to France, my sister tricked me into asking our dad for a biere froid (cold beer), thinking it was French for "ice cream." I had a Barbie ice cream parlor set (which, Mom, we should have kept, as it appears to be fetching quite the price on Amazon) complete with a tiny ice cream freezer we could never quite get to work. Before this weekend, I had never made ice cream.

Last week, I borrowed my friend's machine to test out a few recipes I had in mind. It's really quite simple; you deep-freeze a bowl with thick, gel-filled sides (it makes a great sloshing sound when unfrozen). The gel freezes cold enough to stay relatively frozen for a good half-hour or more as an electric paddle turns 'round and 'round your ice cream base. The ice cream chills from the thick, frozen walls of the bowl toward the center, slowly freezing the liquid into a luxurious, soft-serve consistency which you can then freeze harder if desired. It was fascinating to watch (I couldn't tear my eyes away for the first couple minutes), literally watching the ice cream solidify before you:

I made three kinds: Meyer lemon sorbet (unbelievably refreshing), peanut butter ice cream (unbelievably rich), and my crowning glory: salted caramel with bacon (unbelievably delicious). The last was the prettiest (and most complicated), with swirls of home-made caramel making beautiful patterns as I combined it with the creamy base:

But what did I do with three batches of ice cream, you ask? More on that later.