We received this as a family Christmas gift. My son has severe nut allergies and we cannot buy much in the way of ice cream products from the store. Plus I love soft serve ice cream. So this has saved the day. We use it almost every night. We mix up the liquid when we make dinner. We put it in the refrigerator until dinner is ready. Then a few minutes into dinner I hop up insert the bowl and pour in the mixture. The only catch is the recipes in the booklet are way too much volume to get a proper consistency of ice cream. So we half all recipes and it it works great. We make the vanilla most often and use 1/2 cup 2% milk and 1 cup nonfat. The full fat version in the recipe book is yummy, but not appropriate (way too much fat) for our family given we have it for desert most nights. Approx. 20 minutes ice cream is done. We have done as much as a 3/4 recipe (3/4 cup 2% - 1 1/2 cup non fat)and it works. But that is the maximum you can use if you want it to freeze to a proper soft serve ice cream consistency. The lid also tends to pop up once the consistency gets thicker so we use one of my 5 lb weights to rest on top and keep the lid in place. The only draw back is if you have a bigger family (it is just the 3 of us) it doesn't make a bunch of ice cream relative quantity. This is a great machine. We all highly recommend it.
Not bad for the first time trying - Tammy I. - Oregon, USA
We "bought" one of these using our reward points from a credit card.
Used it last night for the first time. It worked just as it said it would. We froze the bowl overnight, making sure there was no noise when we shook it. Whisked the ingredients in a bowl, turned the maker on and slowly poured the ingredients in. The grandkids watched it almost the whole 20 minutes! We made the vanilla last night and are trying the chocolate tonight. The first little bit that comes out is liquid (as it says in the booklet) and it takes a little practice getting in the cone, but over-all we all enjoyed it. I'm ordering a second bowl to have on-hand for larger gatherings. (Although, we figured the cost out - it's cheaper to buy store bought ice cream on sale! too bad...)
Underpowered, soft-soft-soft serve! - R. Mitchell - Seattle, WA
This is a poor quality product with a weak motor. As indicated in other reviews, the mixing bowl requires pre-freezing overnight (not a total surprise in a unit of this price). The BIG problem is that the motor quits spinning the paddles long before the ice-cream is of a consistency for "soft-serve" ice cream, resulting in a rapidly melting mess of ice cream. Furthermore, the dispensing of the ice cream is painfully slow. Just when you think you might (*might*) be able to get away with spooning out the ice cream that the machine could not dispense because of an overheating motor...you remember that the bottom of the ice cream mixing bowl has a hole in it (where the ice cream should dispense)...so just taking apart the machine is a mess. Try getting the ice cream out and you'll waste a lot of effort, waste a lot of ice cream, and have a real mess on your hands (literally).
SKIP THIS MACHINE and either buy a traditional ice-based freezer, or a simple frozen gel chill machine or go for the gusto and get a real freezer with a built in compressor...but don't buy this or you will be terribly disappointed!
A really dumb product - James W. Cooper - Wilton, CT
Not to imply that the ice cream maker isn't well made, but it is simply a dumb idea. All of the product literature implies that this product MAKEs ice cream, as if it actually chilled the cream mixture. What they don't tell you directly is that you have to chill the mixer bowl in your freezer for many hours before you can use it. I can say that 4 hours wasn't enough, and all I got was soup.
I can make more ice cream faster and better using a bag of ice and my Sears ice cream maker in about 25 minutes. No long annoying waits for the bowl to chill!
The only creative idea in this product is that it allows you to mix in 1 -3 different streams of solids like mini-M&Ms or crushed Heath bars while you are extruding a cone. I never got to try this because I sent the whole thing back, but I think I could do as well with a spoon and save a lot of money and effort.
And incidentally, cleaning this thing is a major project. There are lots of pieces to be hand washed and dried, including the little mix-in reservoirs.
Cuisinart should be ashamed of foisting this thing on us.
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