Dairy-Free Vanilla Ice Cream

I love ice cream. I especially love hot fudge sundaes. Trey can tell you, I pretty much try to con him into getting hot fudge sundaes every week. I'm shameless.

This is no ordinary sundae, as the base of this is something totally delicious but a little bit unexpected. This ice cream recipe is soy-based, so if you're vegan or just dairy free for whatever reason, I highly recommend you give this a try. It's a treat!

Dairy-Free Vanilla Ice Cream, makes one quart.

two 8 oz. packages of dairy-free cream cheese (I used Tofutti brand)
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 cups soy milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or the seeds from one vanilla bean)

Allow the cream cheese to soften to room temperature. Whip the sugar and vanilla into the cream cheese. Then slowly add the milk so the mixture is well combined and free of lumps. Refrigerate the mixture until cold (at least 2 hours or overnight).

Now pour the ice cream batter into your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer instructions (all ice cream makers work a little bit differently).

I recently bought this Cuisinart ice cream maker (in teal, of course) for the office kitchen. At home I use a KitchenAid attachment ice cream maker. I often get asked about what ice cream maker is best, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out a different one and also not have to lug mine back and forth from home.

This ice cream maker was good. It pretty much yielded exactly the same results as my KitchenAid attachment, and it was a little less expensive. The more you know, right? :)

As with most ice cream makers (from what I can tell), the ice cream right out of the maker tends to be more of a soft serve consistency. If you like your consistency a little more solid, more scoop-able if you will, then freeze the ice cream again overnight.

Above, you see the consistency of this ice cream recipe if you freeze it the additional night after making it. It's the perfect consistency, if you ask me. But, like I said, if you like soft serve then you'll have less time to wait for your homemade ice cream.

Top with hot fudge, sprinkles, cookie dough, or chopped up Oreo bits. Did you know Oreos are vegan friendly? Weird, right?

It's gonna be summer before you know it, so get your ice cream makers out, guys! xo. Emma

Credits // Author: Emma Chapman, Photography by: Sarah Rhodes. Photos edited using Stella from the Signature Collection.