Nutella Homemade Ice Cream without a Machine

Whilst using my StumbleUpon, as I often do, I found the Kevin & Amanda blog, where I found Easy Homemade Ice Cream without a Machine. Nutella in ice cream? Yes, please! I had to try it out.

Ice cream is getting expensive these days, and I’m not even old enough to remember nickel cones. When ice cream is regular price, it’s like $6 for a half gallon (or less, because those things keep shrinking in volume; and I’m not even talking about premium ice cream brands) so I also wondered if making your own would be cheaper than buying it. (And also, my in-laws keep like 10 flavors on hand, so the kids get their ice cream fix there). Plus, you can’t customize flavors in the store.

It’s a super simple recipe: a pint of heavy whipping cream, a can of sweetened condensed milk, and your flavoring of choice. The blog recommended Eagle brand condensed milk; maybe that has a better flavor, but I’m not sure. At our local grocery store, the store brand was on sale ($3.29) and Eagle Brand was like $4.50 for some reason, so I got the store brand.

The cream was also store brand ($2.99, on sale). I think Costco has whipping cream for a lot less in a half gallon container. Important, yes, because that will give you 8 cups instead of 2, so you can do this recipe 4 different times!

So you just whip the cream into stiff peaks in a large bowl. Then, in another large bowl, you combine the condensed milk (which is just milk and sugar and also the stuff they pour onto shave ice sometimes, which is how my kids recognized it), and your flavoring. I used a half cup of Nutella; I had no peanut butter chips, so I used a quarter cup of natural peanut butter. I skipped the melted butter; I didn’t think I needed it because I thought it had something to do with the peanut butter chips (though I could be wrong).

Fold the whipped cream into the other combined ingredients.

It turns into this:

And then you freeze it for six hours. I mixed it in a Tupperware bowl with a lid, so I just popped it into the freezer. I froze it for 8 hours and managed to snap a picture before it was sucked down.

Ours looked less ice-creamy than the one on the blog, and more like a frozen mousse.

The verdict? “Delicious and delectable,” said Little Girl. There was just enough for our family of 5 to have one (equally portioned, of course) serving apiece. I also would, next time, get the peanut butter chips, or just use Nutella alone, or mix in the peanut butter less so it’s chunkier and less incorporated into the ice cream.