Our boy is back

Frosty Boy is back!

Comms tech Shaun and Galley Materials extraordinaire Leah serving up some vanilla ice cream.

With great sorrow, I wrote about the health problems of our ice cream machine, which we generically call "Frosty Boy" in a previous post "Save Our Frosty Boy". After many frustrating days, our UTs were able to resurrect it to life.

Now we can have our ice cream bar on Saturday nights once again! To the Frosty Boy CEO in Brisbane who left a comment, thanks for your sympathy and I'm sorry that we don't have real Frosty Boy ice cream in our machine but it's truly a well-intentioned compliment that we call our machine "Frosty Boy" and not just the ice cream machine.

And while the boy was down, I made some ice cream the old fashioned way. Well, it's more like an old-fashioned science-aided way of using liquid nitrogen for the freezing. Our cryogenics tech Chris maintains a liquid nitrogen plant out at MAPO and the nitrogen is used to cool down the telescopes optics. He brought over a dewar of LN2 that I used to freeze a plantar wart on a patient and with the leftover nitrogen, I whipped up a batch of ice cream.

Add a little chocolate ice cream mix, add a lot of Kahlua, add a little bit of liquid nitrogen and watch the show. It's a fun and quick way to make it and the nitrogen completely evaporates after doing its freezing business. The Kahlua chocolate ice cream pies turned out really well even though I did a very inelegant job of decorating the tops with whipped cream. Even though Frosty Boy is in good health these days, I might keep making special batches of nitrogen ice cream...mmmm...cookies and cream...or maybe mint chocolate chip...or pecan praline or...