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I love ice cream. At one point this year, there were probably eight different kinds of ice cream in our home, with Ben & Jerry’s, Tillamook, Hudsonville and Van Leeuwen all in the mix. (This is a perfectly normal amount of ice cream to have.) But what if I could make my own ice cream?
That was the question posed to me when the Cuisinart FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker showed up at my house.
The ice cream maker comes with the promise of “half a pint of flavorful ice cream in minutes at the touch of a button.” That’s the kind of promise that immediately grabs my attention.
I’ve long dreamed of owning an ice cream maker. My attempts to add one to our wedding registry a decade ago were all shot down. What’s the point of having a KitchenAid Stand Mixer if you don’t also have the ice cream maker attachment?
Well, now I had an ice cream maker in my possession. (Just in time to close out National Ice Cream Month.) It was time to see if it lived up to my dreams.
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The Cuisinart FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker. / Snackology
My thoughts
The Cuisinart FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker comes with five key elements: The Mixing Assembly, the Power Handle and three half-pint cups with lids. (The 250th Celebration Limited Edition model comes with red, white and blue lids while the standard model comes in more muted pastel colors.)
Unboxing the ice cream maker feels like there’s a lot going on, but the FastFreeze model is actually pretty simple. Your ice cream goes in the cups. The cups hook into the Mixing Assembly and then the Power Handle (which might be the name of a rejected Nintendo accessory from the 1990s) goes into the top of the Mixing Assembly.
The Cuisinart FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker elements. / Snackology
The FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker comes with an instruction booklet full of ideas for ice cream, sorbet, slushees and shakes to get you started. While I had lofty ambitions to craft an ice worthy of Snackology — candy? gummies? cereal? — our daughter requested that we start with chocolate.
As a compromise, I chose the Chocolate Cookies and Cream Ice Cream recipe from the booklet, with the idea that we’d make one half-pint with crushed Oreo cookies and one without.
The base for Chocolate Cookies and Cream Ice Cream. / Snackology
As I planned out the process for using the FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker, it quickly became clear that the biggest hurdle to using it would be the time required for the ice cream base to chill in the freezer. Every recipe requires a 24-hour trip to the freezer between preparing a base and then turning that base into ice cream.
My lack of foresight caused us to abort the process on a previous Sunday after we realized that we couldn’t make jumping back into making ice cream on a Monday a reality.
Two half-pints of Chocolate Cookies and Cream Ice Cream ready for the freezer. / Snackology
Making the chocolate ice cream base on a Saturday morning was a breeze. I made sure we had whole milk, heavy cream and a fresh canister of cocoa powder the day before, and my daughter and I easily whisked together the ingredients, filled two of the half-pint cups and placed them in the freezer.
Two half-pints of Chocolate Cookies and Cream Ice Cream after freezing for 24 hours. / Snackology
When we pulled the cups out of the freezer the following Sunday, the ice cream base looked more or less like what you’d expect ice cream to look like if you let it melt before trying to refreeze it. It definitely smelled like chocolate ice cream.
To turn an ice cream base into actual ice cream, you have to attach the Mixing Assembly (the section with the blades) to the top of a cup. The Power Handle then clicks into the top of the Mixing Assembly. We made sure the Power Handle was set to “Ice Cream” and then I pressed the start button.
Here’s the part of this review where I admit that I didn’t read the instructions as carefully as I should have. After standing there wondering if the FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker was working for several minutes, I realized that I had missed a key part of the instructions. You gotta apply some pressure to the Power Handle and actually press it down. It doesn’t move on its own.
Once I corrected my mistake, we were on our way.
A half-pint of Chocolate Cookies and Cream Ice Cream after getting turned into ice cream. / Snackology
The FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker is super simple to operate once you, well, read the instructions. You press it down until the light turns red. Then you slowly guide the Power Handle back up until the light turns green. Depending on the recipe or kind of frozen treat you’re making, you might repeat that process.
We did it twice and were greeted by a batch of chocolate ice cream. It worked!
But we weren’t done yet.
A half-pint of Chocolate Cookies and Cream Ice Cream with quartered Oreo cookies. / Snackology
Our first batch of chocolate ice cream was going to get upgraded with Oreo cookies. Despite having access to approximately a billion different flavors of Oreos, I followed the recipe and stuck with the classic variety. Two quartered cookies went into the cup.
Switching the Power Handle to the “Mix Ins” setting, we expertly repeated the process.
Chocolate Cookies and Cream Ice Cream after going through the entire Cuisinart FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker process. / Snackology
When we unhooked the cup from the Mixing Assembly, there was a delightful little batch of chocolate ice cream with Oreo cookies crushed into it waiting for us.
I’m gonna eat this Chocolate Cookies and Cream Ice Cream. / Snackology
Look at that! We made our own ice cream.
Our ice cream from the FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker was creamy and still cold despite its journey through the mixer. My suggestion that we go crazy and add some of the Wegmans cookies and brownies that we had at home into the second batch of chocolate ice cream was vetoed by our daughter. I respect her desire for unblemished chocolate ice cream.
Half-pints of Chocolate Cookies and Cream Ice Cream with and without Oreo cookies. / Snackology
I only have two real issues with the Cuisinart FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker.
One, a half-pint isn’t a lot of ice cream. It seems that Cuisinart also knows this, which is why they rolled out a 1-pint version a few months ago. (I’d argue that a pint of ice cream still isn’t a lot of ice cream, but I’m not someone prone to moderation when it comes to this dessert.)
And two, the promise that the FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker delivers ice cream “in minutes at the touch of a button” is true ... but only after you prepare your ice cream base and freeze it for an entire day. Unless you just happen to have a freezer full of cups of frozen mixtures ready to go, you gotta remind yourself to get them ready. (There is a “Milkshake” setting, but that requires ice cream to begin with.)
A quickly devoured half-pint of Chocolate Cookies and Cream Ice Cream and the Cuisinart FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker Power Handle. / Snackology
But those two complaints didn’t ruin the experience of making — and eating — our own ice cream. Our daughter certainly enjoyed both parts of the process, and we’re eager to experiment with the FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker on not only other flavors of ice cream but with shaved ice and milkshakes.
The Omnicosm founder. Snackology, Popculturology and The Cold Open writer. A Rochester, N.Y., native now living in the Washington, D.C., area. Won’t pass up a Genny Cream Ale.
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