Thursday Recipe - Easy Ice Cream

I used to have one of these:

Note the ice and salt mix to keep it cold. Yes, the thing was electric but it never worked right. It also took a lot of planning - buy enough ice, make sure I had rock salt, buy the ice cream mix, etc. We never did get good ice cream out of the thing. It was messy and took forever. And noisy? Hoo, boy. Loud enough to drown out the vacuum cleaner.

A couple years ago, I bought one of these for my birthday:

It's small, true. But, it uses frozen bowls inside to make ice cream. No salt, no ice, no mess. You just have to keep the bowl in the freezer. It's hand wash only, which means when we do make ice cream, the bowl usually sits next to the sink for a few days until someone decides to do hand wash. So, I got a second bowl for my birthday last summer. It's that easy and that quiet. It takes about 15 minutes to make ice cream and it's soft and creamy, perfect. We haven't made sorbets in it yet, but that's another possibility. I did make coconut milk ice cream, but the recipe still needs some tweaking.

For now, here's my recipe for super easy Chocolate Ice Cream.

Super Easy Chocolate Ice Cream

4 c. chocolate milk
1 4 serving size box of chocolate fudge pudding mix

Mix pudding mix with the milk. Yes it will be runny. It's supposed to be. I know what it says on the box, just ignore it and trust me.

Start up your 1.5 quart ice cream maker. Pour the mix in the top. Let it run for about 15 minutes. Turn it off and enjoy chocolatey fudgey ice cream goodness.

Variations:
Use regular milk and any flavor of pudding mix you want. Pistachio ice cream, anyone?

These ice cream makers have a different kind of dasher, so feel free to add chopped fruit, nuts, chocolate chips, crumbled cookies, or whatever you want as you mix the ice cream.