No-machine ice cream

This afternoon my kids and I made homemade ice cream, but without an ice cream maker! I saw this recently on Kevin & Amanda's Recipes and I had to give it a try. Ready for the ingredients?

• 1 can of sweetened condensed milk
• 2 cups of heavy cream

That's it! Your base for some very creamy, tasty, no-machine ice cream. All you do is mix in whatever flavorings, fruits, add-ins, etc. that you want to, into the sweetened condensed milk. Beat the cream until stiff peaks form, and fold it into the other mixture. Then put it into a container and into the freezer for several hours until it's firm. It couldn't be any easier, could it!

If you click on that link above, Kevin & Amanda post several recipe ideas using this easy base. But today with my kids, I gave them some ideas for recipes and we just experimented... knowing that we couldn't really go wrong! We doubled the recipe and then split it into four portions for my four kids. Here are our flavors:

peanut butter, with peanut butter chips and white chocolate chips

chocolate with white chocolate chips

chocolate with mini marshmellows

strawberry

For each flavor, we added a little vanilla. For the peanut butter, we added about 1/2 c of creamy peanut butter. For the chocolate, with one of them we used cocoa powder and a little sugar to offset the bitterness; for the other chocolate we used hot chocolate mix powder. That made for a good flavor but it was a little grainy; it didn't completely dissolve. For the strawberry, we hulled a pint of strawberries and put them in the blender, then mixed them with about 2T sugar. Remember, each of these batches were a 1/2 batch.

Since the batches were small, most of them were frozen in about 5 hours. The strawberry batch yielded more because of the bulk of a full pint of berries, and took longer to set up.

I would encourage you to try this basic recipe and be creative with the flavors! Next time I'm going to make a mixed-fruit one; I'm thinking peaches and bananas. I couldn't convince any of my kids to choose that as their flavor today. This base makes for a very nice texture and if you don't mind waiting several hours for it to freeze, go for it!