Summer officially started this past Sunday, which means it’s time to enjoy a classic summer treat: Homemade ice cream! Before you run out to buy an ice cream maker, try making it with just your freezer - we promise it can be done.
Because we know how irritating it can be to read someone’s life story before a recipe, we’re going to cut to the chase.
Before you get started, you’ll need an 8-10 inch square baking pan for freezing your ice cream!
Ingredients for Homemade Ice Cream
- 1 ½ cups milk
- 1 ½ cups heavy cream
- ⅔ cup sugar
- 1 tbsp vanilla extract
- ⅛ tsp kosher salt
Recipe Instructions
Combine all of the ingredients into one bowl and mix well, then pour into your baking pan.
Place in your freezer for 90 minutes.
Remove the pan and whisk the mixture up, making sure that you scrape the sides of the pan for any frozen bits.
Place the pan back in your freezer for 45 minutes.
After this freeze, remove it and again, whisk it like you did before.
At this point, you’ll alternate between freezing the pan for 30 minutes and whisking the mixture. The longer you whisk the ice cream and freeze it, the fluffier the ice cream will become. Do it for long enough, and you might even get it to a soft-serve consistency!
Ice Cream Additives
If you’re wanting to make your ice cream more interesting, you can always flavor it with flavoring extracts, or add something to mix in with it that gives it a little flair. Popular choices for additives include:
- Candy: Peppermint, chocolate chips, butterscotch, M&Ms, Butterfingers.
- Cookies: Oreos, chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies, snickerdoodles.
- Fruit: Strawberries, blueberries, peaches, bananas, plums.
Each of these will take a little extra time, but you can easily work these into the right texture while your ice cream freezes.
For candy and cookies, make sure your preferred choice is out of its wrapper (if it was in one to begin with). Put the candy or cookies into a freezer bag and use a rolling pin or wooden spoon to break them up into small pieces. After the third freeze, add it to your ice cream mixture, whisk everything together, and place the ice cream back in the freezer.
Fruit can be either cut into small pieces and added, or if you want to use it to flavor your ice cream entirely, you can blitz it into smoothness using a blender.
Other Ways to Jazz Up Your Ice Cream
Not putting any additives in? You can still dress up your ice cream to make it more tasty! Liquid toppings like chocolate syrup, hot fudge, or caramel are classics for any ice cream sundae. You can also get strawberry syrup, peanut butter topping, or even chocolate syrup that will freeze into a hard coating over your ice cream.
If you’re not into putting a lot of additives or toppings in your ice cream, or just want to enjoy the vanilla flavor itself, you can also serve the ice cream along your favorite cake, brownie, pie, or cobbler.
In the end, there’s really not a wrong way to service ice cream, so make it, freeze it, and enjoy!