Nutella Peanut Butter Ice Cream With No Machine!

Since you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re intrigued by the idea of homemade Nutella peanut butter ice cream. You might be thinking, Wow, that sounds outstanding! And without an ice cream maker? Great!

But if you’re like me, you’re understandably skeptical.

I bet it won’t taste right. Surely the texture will be all wrong. It’s probably some complicated process involving a contraption rivaling that of MacGyver’s best work. I bet I’m going to need a tiny amount of an incredibly rare and expensive ingredient that I will never use again.

Well no need to worry, because this is a perfect summer treat that is extremely easy and uses very simple ingredients! You just whip cream to stiff peaks and then fold it into sweetened condensed milk with the Nutella and peanut butter mixed in. When you first make it, it’s the texture of a fluffy mousse, but when you freeze it, it hardens just like ice cream. Delicious, creamy, chocolatey, peanut buttery ice cream!

I see a lot of ice cream recipes and think, “Wow, that looks so good!” But I don’t have an ice cream maker, and I have no interest in getting one. Even though we have a lot more room in our kitchen since we remodeled, I don’t want to store another one-trick-pony machine to use a couple of months out of the year. I only recently got a waffle iron (which I’m obsessed with by the way, but that’s for another post). So, when I saw a recipe for ice cream that did not require an ice cream maker, I was intrigued. I opened the link and started reading, saw that it was super doable, and I got really excited! Reading farther, I learned that you can basically make any flavor you want by adding things into the ice cream. So of course, the first flavor I decided to try was Nutella peanut butter. Naturally, you could put any combination of toppings or add ins you could dream up into the sweetened condensed milk to flavor your ice cream as you wish.

Wow, talk about delicious. Even my husband, who is not generally skeptical of my cooking abilities, said skeptically, “You made that?!” when he tasted it. Yes, yes I did. (Maybe he had intuitively noted the absence of an ice cream maker in our household.) The Nutella peanut butter flavor was a huge hit in our household. It was incredibly rich and blissful. The texture was even smoother and creamier than churned ice cream. I’m so excited to try different flavors, but the Nutella peanut butter was so good, I’m going to want to keep making it! I’m having a hard time not eating this every day, which you could do, of course. I won’t tell. 🙂

I don’t know about you, but we have been spending a lot of time outside this summer. Wes, our almost 15 month old, loves to be outside, so we are clocking a lot of hours in the backyard and miles on the stroller. We eat pretty healthy, but it is summer after all, so we indulge in some ice cream every now and then to help us cool down after a hard day of playing outside. Hey, we have to counterbalance all of those calories we burn on our walks somehow!

Machine-less Homemade Ice Cream

Ingredients:

(For the base ice cream)

• 2 cups (16 oz) heavy cream
• 1 can of sweetened condensed milk

Plus add ins…anything you want, but I used:

• 3 tablespoons of peanut butter
• 1/2 cup of Nutella
• About 1/4 cup of peanut butter chips
• About 1/4 cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions:

In a stand mixer (I used a whisk attachment), beat the cream to stiff peaks. In a separate bowl, stir the peanut butter, Nutella, and chips into the sweetened condensed milk. (Alternately, stir in any other add-ins to the sweetened condensed milk you would like – fruit, nuts, caramel, fudge, cookies, brownie chunks, candy, vanilla bean, etc.) Fold the whipped cream into the sweetened condensed milk. Cover and freeze for at least six hours before serving.

That’s it! See? I told you it was easy!

Enjoy!