YayLabs Play and Freeze Ice Cream Ball Ice Cream Maker, Pint, Blue

I'm very please with the ice cream I've turned out from this ice cream ball. I've used it four times now, and each time I've tweaked the recipe slightly, and each time turned out delicious ice cream. A couple of things I learned:1. After you open the lid on the ice-cream end to stir it, make sure to wipe off the rubber gasket on the lid and refasten it very tightly, otherwise you may get some slight leakage. Same goes for the ice side, especially if you're using table salt.2. The ball gets VERY cold and frosty on the outside. I usually lay it on a bath towel and roll it back and forth.3. Do not fill the ice cream ingredients to the brim! The ingredients need room to expand as they freeze. Leave at least 1/2" of space at the top (more if you can).4. The ice cream freezes pretty hard to the metal cylinder. I've had good luck using a butter knife to scrape it away from the sides when its finished.

It's considerably cheaper than an actual ice cream maker, and it's a lot of fun to play with, but I didn't much care for the texture or consistency of the ice cream that it produced. Anything closer to the bottom of the cylinder gets extremely cold and freezer without mixing into any of the ingredients, then becomes practically impossible to get out of the container. The recipes themselves were rather flavorless and uninspired, but easy enough to dress up if you have a little kitchen know how.It would be a great thing to have around for the kids, but it fell pretty flat in my house.

The negatives:takes more time than indicated in instructions to "make" the ice cream into a decent consistencyleaks rock salt into chamber so the ice cream tastes like rock salt, unedibleMakes less than a pint.Go buy a tub of ice cream instead.

Ok, this was a hit with my children with the shaking....But, and this is a big caveat, the opening to scoop out the ice cream is only slightly larger than the freezer tube coming from the other end, and getting ice cream out with anything larger than a teaspoon or rubber spatula is impossible. It took 5 minutes to get only a small portion of the ice cream out.We had to wait for the ice cream to melt and pour it out.The opening could be 1/2 inch larger all around and would make retrieving ice cream much, much easier.

We love this ice cream maker because it's fun, educational, and makes healthy ice cream or frozen yogurt. We have an ice maker in our freezer and the ice cubes are longer and narrower than tray cubes, so they fit perfectly. If you you don't have an automatic ice maker, just put less water in your ice cube trays, so the cubes fit in the ball! I like that you can teach your kids about science--how ice lowers the freezing point, etc. Throwing/rolling the ball around is good exercise and makes you feel less guilty about eating ice cream. Do it outside on the grass, so you don't crack the ball. I also like that you can make healthier ice cream without all the chemicals that you see in most ice creams. You can make vanilla ice cream with 3 ingredients--all organic if you want. I have only made 1 cup at a time, instead of a pint, since that is the perfect amount for 2 little ones plus a taste for mom or dad. It can be a little hard to scrape the ice cream off the sides, but if you empty out the ice, then the ice cream starts to soften enough to scoop it out. We're looking forward to trying out the different recipes in the included booklet.

We have one like this, and we love it so much. So we bought a friend one. He also loved it. This is a great little icecream maker. I would recommmend this to everyone. It is perfect for one person. And it only takes about 15 minutes to make a pint of homemade ice cream. What I usually do is have the stuff to make 2 or 3 batchs of ice cream. I make 1 batch, take it out of the tub, and pour in the next tub. This way I can use the same salt & ice more than once. Even though sometimes I do have to add a little more salt & ice. Still not like starting over. And the bonus is my husband always has ice cream in the freezer.

I bought this when my son was 4 years old. We still use it occasionally, but it's a lot of work and it's difficult to get the consistency of ice cream (it doesn't get cold enough) even when using 100% cream and rolling it non-stop.

i found it a little hard to shake for 20min but boy the result was worth it. i really did not expect it to work, but we were all amazed. perfect birthday gift for my ice cream lover nephew. just follow instructions and you shall be amazed. also, the ball was bigger than i expected. thank you. one more thing, it does get a little messy, with water dripping from the sides, so outdoors might be a better option. and i have not gotten to the scraping part, left that to the kids, but it seemed a little tedious.