Sugar-Free Vegan Chocolate Coconut Ice Cream

While it may only be spring here in Australia, it sure seems like summer to me. All of this heat - it was 33 (90 degrees F) degrees today - has been making me want ice cream or some other cold treat. And because we’ve recently adopted a sugar-free diet, there really isn’t an easy way to obtain [sugar-free] ice cream. Which is why I want to purchase an ice cream maker. Brett made a good point today though; he told me that we should probably attempt making homemade ice cream by hand before we pay the money for an automatic one.  So that’s what I did today. I made homemade ice cream, by hand.

I started with Google-ing “making homemade ice cream” because I’ve never made homemade ice cream by hand before. I came across a few good links about making ice cream by hand and then decided that I wanted to attempt using coconut milk instead of soy or rice milk. So I Googled that too and found another great site in the process. The entire process was much, much easier than I was expecting.

Here’s the recipe:

2 cans (400 mL) full fat coconut milk

2/3 cups raw coco powder

1/3 cups glucose syrup 

1 tsp vanilla extract

I simply whisked all of the ingredients together in a bowl until they were combined well and then transferred the mixture to a baking dish I had sitting in the freezer. I left the mixture in the freezer for about an hour and then checked it but it hadn't begun to form ice crystals yet so we went to the pool and came back and I've been stirring every hour for about 7 hours now. The mixture tastes great but we’re still waiting on our ice cream – it’s 8:30 at night and I’m pretty certain we won’t be having ice cream until tomorrow night. I think our freezer just isn't cold enough. Needless to say, we’ll be purchasing that ice cream maker shortly. ;)

As I've said before...she really, really enjoys the swings