Easy Nutella Banana Ice Cream

I love ice cream. Any kind of ice cream. I could eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But with four kids {who already run towards crazy and chaotic}, introducing more sugar into our lives just isn’t smart. So we try to make our own as often as we can so we control the ingredients that go into it. This one might just be my favorite flavor ever.

Easy Nutella banana ice cream… oh.my.yum.

 

 

Since we’re big fans of having the kids learn new skills — especially in the kitchen — I turned this one over to them, challenging Trevor and Molly to come up with a twist on the one-ingredient banana ice cream we started making last year. Incidentally, did you know that it is amazingly easy to make ice cream with just bananas?

It’s true. Freeze a bunch of very ripe bananas in slices, and run through a super powerful blender like a Blendtec or Vitamix, or use your food processor. I’ve used both, and while it takes a little patience, the result is creamy ice cream that tastes amazing by itself or with chocolate sauce drizzled on top.

So, this week, I asked the kids to add something to the ice cream to make it better while we were blending it. I was thinking peanut butter as I’d seen that combination somewhere around the web, but in a stroke of brilliance Molly suggested Nutella.

Chocolate. Hazelnut. Banana.

Wow.

Just take about 6 cups of frozen banana slices and blend them on high in your food processor or Vitamix. Keep mixing until they are the consistency of creamy, scoopable ice cream — you may need to scrape the sides down once or twice. Trevor used the tamper insert for our Vitamix.

 

 

Once the bananas look like ice cream, add two tablespoons of Nutella. Blend this in until it’s incorporated. The Nutella thins the ice cream down a little, so scoop it into a freezer-safe container and pop it in the freezer for a few hours.

 

 

After two or more hours, scoop your delicious Nutella banana ice cream into dishes and garnish with chocolate chips or nuts. Your family will thank you. In fact, since this ice cream is mostly fruit, we had it for breakfast the other day.  Fruit makes a great breakfast, right? Even if it does have chocolate in it too.

 

 

Do you have other ideas for additions to the base banana ice cream recipe? I’d love to hear your {or your kids’} thoughts and suggestions.