Strawberry Shortcake Ice Cream

If you’ve never made homemade ice cream, you’re in for a real treat. It’s so much easier than you’d think! You just need a little bit of time, patience, and pre-planning. This strawberry shortcake ice cream is deliciously fruity, lusciously creamy and loaded with strawberry flavor! It’s made with a rich and sweet heavy cream base with fresh strawberries and then churned in an ice cream maker. Finally, the addition of chopped shortbread cookies really takes this frozen treat to the next level!

Why you’ll love this recipe

• Taste. The perfect way to enjoy summer berries! This ice cream is fruity, rich and SO incredibly delicious!
• Texture. It turns out super cold, creamy and refreshing. Great for a hot summer day!
• Time. Even though making ice cream does involve some chill time, there’s very little hands-on time involved.
• Ease. This ice cream recipe is super simple and it’s even a fun activity to do with kids!

Ingredients

Here’s a note on each of the simple 7 ingredients needed to make this ice cream recipe. Be sure to check the printable recipe card, below, for the exact quantities. 

• Fresh strawberries. You’ll need to wash and hull about 2 cups of berries. Feel free to use frozen berries; just thaw them in advance and drain any excess liquid.
• Sugar. We’re adding 1 cup sugar to help enhance the sweetness of the strawberries. 
• Whole milk. For best results, use whole milk to make this recipe.
• Kosher salt. To really bring out the strawberry flavor!
• Vanilla. Adds a wonderful depth of flavor to this strawberry ice cream.
• Heavy cream. For extra rich and creamy ice cream, I don’t recommend swapping this for half-and-half or other milk products.
• Shortbread cookies. Use any favorite shortbread cookies for that classic strawberry shortcake taste.

How to make this recipe

Here’s how to make strawberry shortcake ice cream at home in a few simple steps:

1. Freeze the bowl. The night before, put your ice cream maker bowl in the freezer and let it fully freeze for 24 hours before making your ice cream.
2. Blend ingredients. Add the strawberries, sugar, whole milk, vanilla extract, and salt to a blender. Blend until strawberries are about 95% blended. With the blender on it’s lowest setting, stream in the heavy cream. Once it’s all in there, cut the blender.
3. Churn. Turn your ice cream maker on and add in the mix. Let it churn until it’s “done” (time will be different for every maker). Mine, a kitchenaid attachment, took 20 minutes.
   1. It will grow in size and be thick and creamy. It’s hard to really delineate what it means to be done, but it’s kind of like the consistency of frozen yogurt or soft serve. It will not be proper ice cream at this stage!
   2. Be sure not to over-churn it when it’s fruity like this or you’ll end up with a more icy consistency once it freezes. But if you go till soft serve consistency, it’ll be great!
4. Add cookies. Once it’s nearly finished, chop up the shortbread cookies into bite sized pieces and pour them into your ice cream maker while it’s running. 
5. Freeze. Transfer your ice cream into a large freezable Tupperware or container (I use an 11 cup glass rectangle pyrex most of the time). Pop in the freezer for 4-5 hours, until it has fully set. Scoop and enjoy! 

Tips

Here’s a few tips for perfect ice cream every time:

• Fully read through recipe instructions before beginning. There are multiple steps and it helps to know ahead of time what you’ll need to do.
• It’s super important to make sure the ice cream bowl is fully frozen. If the bowl isn’t fully frozen, the ice cream will not freeze and churn properly. I often store my bowl in the freezer so it’s always ready for another batch of ice cream!
• For added texture and some small strawberries pieces throughout the ice cream, only blend until strawberries are about 95% blended.
• When you’re ready to enjoy, if ice cream is too hard to scoop, let it sit at room temperature for 5-10 minutes.
• I used store-bought shortbread cookies from the Publix bakery area instead of cake or biscuits, as is typically served with strawberry shortcake. They’re easier to come by and they freeze better in my opinion. I think this would work with a yellow cake cut up into pieces similarly to the cookies in the recipe, if you’d rather.

Storage

This ice cream will keep well for about 2-3 weeks in the freezer when properly stored in an airtight container or with plastic wrap on the surface of the ice cream. It’s still good beyond that, but tends to crystallize over time.