I had a few leftover strawberries in my fridge that needed to be used, and I had a few frozen bananas in the freezer, so I decided to blend up some strawberry ice cream in my Vitamix. Then, I decided to turn it into a milk shake, just because!
If strawberry ice cream isn鈥檛 your thing, here are some variations. Just use the frozen bananas as a base:
Ice Cream Flavours
Chocolate Ice Cream: add Cacao Powder
Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream: add Cacao powder & PB2 or Natural Peanut Butter
Vanilla: add in vanilla extract
Mint Chocolate Chip: add a couple of drops of peppermint extract and vegan chocolate chips
Matcha Ice Cream: add in Matcha Green Tea Powder
Keep on reading for instructions on how to made this healthy strawberry vegan ice cream, and to turn this:
Into this:
Ingredients
Ice Cream
3 frozen bananas
4-5 small-medium strawberries
1 tsp xylitol, optional
陆 tsp vanilla extract (can omit if you'd like)
Toppings / Stir-ins
shredded unsweetened coconut, optional
2 tbs vegan chocolate chips
陆 tsp coconut oil
Milkshake
The strawberry ice cream you made
陆 cup unsweetened almond milk
handful of soaked raw cashews
extra water/almond milk
sweetener (agave nectar, soaked pitted dates, xylitol, coconut sugar
Directions
To make the ice cream, blend the frozen bananas, strawberries, xylitol and vanilla until smooth and creamy. If you have a powerful blender, such as a Vitamix, this will be a relatively speedy process. If you have a less powerful blender, you may have to scrape down the sides a couple of times with a spatula to make sure everything gets fully blended.
Transfer into a freezable container and place in the freezer (it might get a bit soft from blending, which is also nice, but I like it to be a little firmer) while you prepare the chocolate.
In a small pot or skillet, heat the chocolate chips and coconut oil just until it is smooth and a pourable consistency. You may be able to omit the coconut oil, but just for the sake of making it a more liquidy consistency, I added it in.
Once your ice cream is at a firmness that you are happy with, remove from the freezer and drizzle on the chocolate and sprinkle with the coconut. The chocolate should harden within a minute or two and make a chocolate shell. Now you're all done! Mmmmm. 馃槉
To make a strawberry milkshake, blend the ice cream with some almond milk. Add more milk if it's too thick. If you want to top with cashew cream, blend some soaked cashews with sweetener and a bit of water/almond milk until it is smooth and creamy. I added just a pinch of beet powder to give a pink colour for the photos, but it doesn't add any flavour, so no worries about adding that in.
This is what it looked like straight out of the blender without being placed in the freezer to firm up- similar to soft-serve consistency: