Homemade Chocolate Chip Mint Ice Cream

Well, it only took one batch for us to fall in love with our Cuisinart Ice Cream maker.  Let's move on to our second attempt. The overwhelming group consensus was that chocolate chip mint must be our next batch of ice cream.  A quick internet search brought up a few recipes, and I was still looking for a no cook version to make things easy on ourselves.  Well now I can say attempt number two was a big hit! Feast your eyes upon this:

Homemade Chocolate Chip Ice Cream with mint leaves from our garden

It was another easy to put together recipe, and the girls helped.  Also I've decided if we are going to be "professional" ice cream makers whipping up batches at the spur of the moment, we are going to have to have heavy cream and whole milk on hand at all times. Luckily, we still had some left over from our first batch. The other tip is to keep the empty canister in the freezer frozen at all times (you can keep bags or corn or peas inside of it to conserve space), so you are good and frozen when you are ready to roll. Here is what you will need:

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups whole milk (original called for 2% milk)
2 2/3 cups heavy cream
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt (original called for 1/2 tsp, I freaked out and only added a smidge)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon mint extract 
(original said peppermint extract, mint is more like the ice cream you would buy in the store)
3 drops green food coloring (optional)
1 cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips

Since I had all the ingredients except mini chocolate chips, my hubby gave me the idea of chopping up regular chocolate chips to save time and money.  So I got my handy-dandy Pampered Chef chopper out and whacked out some pent up frustrations on some tiny morsels of chocolate.

Take that, chocolate!!

Next we mixed the whole milk, heavy cream, sugar, vanilla, and the drops of food coloring in a bowl and used the electric mixture for 1-2 minutes until the sugar had disolved.

As you can see my "helpers" used a bit more than three drops of color, but we did get a great green color out of it

When you are finished you will have something that looks like a Shamrock Shake, the best drink in all of the land.

Pour this frothy mixture into your 2 quart ice cream machine and turn it on

You can actually smell a waft of mint if you stick your nose down in the hole as it spins around. You look ridiculous with your head stuffed down in the top of a machine, but trust me, it will be worth it.

At the 20-25 minute mark you can pour your "add ons" in, this being the crushed chocolate chips.  Let the machine spin for 5 more minutes or so and the chocolate will be incorporated through the whole batch.  After that you will need to chill the whole thing in a separate container in the freezer to harden up and be at a thicker consistency to serve.  By the way, this ice cream was creamy, but not as smooth and creamy as the strawberry ice cream.  My theory is that you need more heavy cream in a recipe than milk.  UPDATED: We tried this again and I updated the above recipe to reflect 2 3/4 cups heavy cream and only 1 1/2 cups of whole milk.  MUCH BETTER on the creaminess factor.  Wow.

Our family's choice for serving is this tiny mini cones (we call them baby cones).  They are just the right size for kids or a little sweet treat snack without going on sugar overload.  These little cones make our ice cream concoctions last almost a week, which is great.  I will continue to make a record of all the recipes we try and keep you posted on our favorites.