Making home made ice cream has been around since cows started giving milk.And the process has changed,rock salt,cracked ice and freeze-dried ingredients plus assorted syrups.Mix the ingredients together,pour them into the ball,seal the lid and hand it over to the kids.After say,twenty to thirty minutes of tossing this ball around open it up and there you have it,mouse-cream.
I bought this to entertain the grand kids and still provide a treat. They love it and I love it. We have made different flavors and they are all good. Instead of using sugar we have been using a sugar substitute and it works really well. However, don't use to much; for our taste buds we only use a couple of teaspoons. The ice cream is good but not like what you get at the store, not quite as creamy. But we use half and half not cream. That could be the difference. We actually like it more because we control what goes in it and it only takes about 30 minutes. Its really easy to use and clean. Again, this is alot of fun for the kids too.
We used heavy cream, sugar and vanilla and got great results. After 30 minutes, some of the ice cream was frozen hard, and about half was still soft. We scooped everything into a container and put it in the freezer to harden up and it did beautifully.
Don't make the mistake we did--we forgot to take everything out of the package so we missed the separate handle that you use to unscrew the compartment lids. Using that would have made things a lot easier.
Half an hour is a LONG time to pass a ball around, but for our family of four it was OK playing "roll the ball" for that long.
Bear in mind that although you will sometimes see this item promoted with pictures of people tossing the ball to each other, the package states you should never toss it. But it's pretty heavy when it's loaded up so kids would probably have a hard time playing catch with it anyway. Rolling it to each other did a good job but you wouldn't want to do that in the dirt if you were camping.
Overall, I see this as a good novelty item--fun once in a while, wouldn't want it to be my only ice cream maker if I planned to make it often.
Leaked big time aroung the middle where the ball is screwed together. But, did make excellent ice cream. I figure that I received a defective unit and I returned for a replacement. Will see how the replacement performs.
