PIQ for college #2

Prompt: Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side.

I express my creative side by problem solving, specifically in food preparation via making protein shakes and protein ice cream. When I first started my workout journey, I often felt hungry after working out and found myself eating snacks and desserts frequently. I later discovered from social media that I could make protein ice cream, but since I did not have an ice cream maker, I found out that I could make it using a blender. However, creating protein ice cream using just a blender was difficult unless I had specific ingredients such as xanthan gum. In terms of texture, I only made protein shakes that were really thick, sometimes they would be more ice cream like and other times, they were more liquid.

After a while, I was not liking the taste of protein shakes so I eventually switched from protein shakes to protein ice cream by buying a Ninja Creami ice cream machine. This helped me actually get what I’ve been wanting to make. While I did take inspiration from social media on what recipes to follow, I did not have the same exact ingredients to really follow the recipe so I made some replacements. An example is that recipes from social media often use almond milk and Fairlife milk, but since I had neither of those, I used non-organic milk which is what I typically have. A problem I had also encountered was that my chocolate flavored ice cream was always bitter. I had tried several ways to fix this issue by adding more chocolate powder or even melting chocolate chips in my preparation in order to make it taste sweet. It did not work and I eventually found that using a natural sweetener was the solution.