Ice Cream Recipes

With the arrival of our ice cream maker in the container, we've been making lots of the creamy goodness. It's a wonderful way to cool off and a nice treat instead of baked goods which involve an oven. We can buy ice cream here, but it is not the same as what we are used to in the states. A quick look at the list of ingredients shows you why - instead of using full cream milk, they use vegetable fat. It's similar in consistency, but the taste (and aftertaste, ick) are much different. Making our own means that we can use real cream and real milk... much better for you, I'm sure, and more what we are used to. In the long run, it's a lot cheaper to make our own, and there are so many more options for flavors and mix-ins!

Vanilla with Chocolate Chunks

Do you have an ice cream maker? Our is like this one here, and filling both bowls yields us two quarts of ice cream. Here are some of our favorite recipes and combinations.

Basic Vanilla Ice Cream
1 16-oz can of coconut milk
2 cups cream
1 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
Pour into bowls, then fill to the top of the beaters with milk.

Basic Chocolate Ice Cream
2 cups cream
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 T cocoa powder (or more... I just dump it in until it looks dark enough :)
Pour into bowls, then fill to the top of the beaters with milk.

Banana Bread Ice Cream

Banana Bread Ice Cream
3 mashed bananas
2 cups cream
2/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp cinnamon
1 T custard powder (you could leave this out if you can't find it)
Pour into bowls, then fill to the top of the beaters with milk.
(This easily turns into 'Chunky Monkey', as we like to call it, by omitting the cinnamon, adding chocolate chunks and nuts.)

Mango Frozen Yogurt
2 mangoes, peeled and mashed
1/2 cup orange juice
4-5 T honey (or more to taste)
2 cups plain yogurt (if you can find greek or bulgarian, that's even better)
Pour into bowls, then fill to the top of the beaters with plain yogurt.

Mango Frozen Yogurt

Orange-Banana Sorbet
5 or 6 juiced oranges, with pulp
2 mashed bananas
2-3 T honey
2 tsp vanilla
2 cups plain yogurt
Pour into bowls, then fill to the top of the beaters with plain yogurt.

The options are limitless, of course. We like to throw in extras of whatever we have on hand - nuts plain or toasted, chocolate chunks, crushed candy bars, crushed cookies or brownies, mini frozen cookie dough balls, swirls of caramel or fudge, ground vanilla bean, crushed coconut, etc.