I watched a cooking show yesterday where they made dried lavender
vanilla ice cream-it sure looked simple and I had the impression they
just put the bowl of thickened strained egg cream in the freezer-no
fancy ice cream maker needed. Making ice cream up fresh in small
quantities sounds good to me.

Frankly a scoop of softserve melting homemade ice cream sounds better to
me than a scoop of rock hard frozen bulk ice cream from the store. (Your
alcohol trick sounds interesting-they make a vanilla flavored vodka-for
cooking purposes I want to be able to buy those tiny little bottles.)

Stabilizer?

Here is a thought-make a "rhubarb in heavy cream" sauce then strain-use
the rhubarb enhanced cream as your base for vanilla ice cream. Rhubarb
is vastly underutilized-grows like a weed self perpetuating. A friend
was serving rhubarb crisp with fresh handcranked ice cream-which never
froze-so we put the cream sauce over the rhubarb crisp-I think that
cream sauce was actually better than frozen ICE cream.

What's your favorite dessert sauce? Mine currently is
bourbon/whiskey/bread pudding sauce-love it over softserve vanilla.