Chocolate Ice Cream – That’s Dairy AND (Added) Sugar Free

OK, I’ll wait till you pick your jaw up off the floor before I continue.

You ready?

Great!

I briefly spoke about the fact that I have recently cut out all dairy and all wheat from my diet for the sake of my skin and all those that have to see me without make up.  If you wanted to know how it’s going, I think that besides the hallucinations that I keep having of random things looking like burgers or pizza – it’s going really well.  This combined with my new skin care regime is really making a difference – I might actually be able to leave the house without make up one day.

The problem that I have faced is that I am craving something chocolate in my life.  Desperately.

So I went and instead of trying out my own random attempts at making something that was sure to fail, I stalked Pinterest.  I viewed maaaaaaany variations, but basically you could make awesome, healthy, dairy free, added sugar free ice cream with just these 3 basic ingredients!

If you are wondering why the bananas look a little funky, let me just reassure you – they are frozen.

TOOLS:

• Food Processor – although I used our smoothie maker thing and it worked well.

• Popsicle moulds or an old 2l ice cream tub that you can just throw all the mixture into and spoon out as desired.

INGREDIENTS:

• 3 ripe bananas
• 2 1/2 tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa
• 3 heaped tablespoons of peanut butter (we used crunchy but if you are paleo you can substitute for any nut butter of your choice – the less sugar the better)
• 1 Teaspoon of vanilla essence (Thanks Julie for this tip)

They say hindsight is 20/20.  So I froze them with the skin on and then had to slice the skin off before I could blend it.  I don’t know how they would have done being peeled first, but that would have made it go a lot quicker.  TIP: blend the banana’s and mixture first and then freeze – much easier on your blender.

I sliced them and chucked them in the blender.  Then I didn’t even wait for it to go creamy before I added the peanut butter.  (This was only because the bananas were not descending nicely to the blades and so the motor was starting to scream at me).

At this point I added about a table spoon of rice milk just to try and get it to blend, but I don’t think this is essential at all.  Then I chucked in the cocoa and a smidge of honey (the kids were more inclined to eat it if it was a bit sweeter – totally optional).  I blended it until it looked lovely and creamy.

We spooned it into our little ice lolly moulds and then put them into the freezer to set.

The girls ate their after supper and I didn’t even feel guilty because there’s no sugar in it!  We waited for the kids to go to bed before we indulged in ours…

It was so yum!

Seth was ready for another one after finishing his, but I was definitely cured of my chocolate craving!  Let me know if you try it and how it turned out.