Banana Chocolate/Coconut Ice Cream

Ok, this is some seriously good stuff. My latest discovery – rich, creamy and addictive ice-cream. It’s like Bounty, banana split and Nutella are having a party together and you are invited. You will need only 5 ingredients and 1 hour of patience to find out what I mean.

I actually tag this recipe as a “healthy dessert”, while there are no added sugars, milk, or cream. Perhaps I should not have called it ice-cream, but to me, this is better than any ice-cream in the world (and I just got back from Italy). Call me crazy, but still, try it! It might be that you’ll love it as much as I do. Otherwise, I hope you’ll find this guilt-free pleasure to be a good compromise for the detox times.

Does it happen often in your kitchen, that bananas turn ripe and brown, and you through them away because you don’t know what to do with them and because you find them a little bit disgusting? I have to say, in my kitchen, ripe bananas are quite unusual. We buy only slightly greenish bananas and normally never more than two at a time. If this still happens, I usually think direction baking. I love banana bread, and banana muffins and cookies.

But it’s summer outside, it’s already hot in my kitchen and turning the oven on is the last thing I want to do. Freezer, on the other hand, sounds just perfect. So this is how the idea was born.

Would be fair to say that I already heard about making banana ice-cream by simply pulsing bananas in the blender and freezing it. I even tried it before, but I was not happy with the result because it turned out to be icy, with no creamy consistency whatsoever.

This time, I added a little bit of peanut butter (only 2 spoons for 2 bananas), and I think this did the trick! Creamy consistency achieved 🙂

I also experimented with the ways of freezing it. I froze one half of the banana mixture in a pretty jar (as you can see on the picture), and the other half in the silicon ice cube tray (I have an IKEA one, with hearts-shaped moulds). The second way is my absolute favorite. First of all, because the small ice-cream hearts are extremely cute and second because this way it is easier to control their consumption 😉 But it really depends on your mood and occasion.

When you have a sweet tooth, just take a few of the little hearts out of the freezer and let them defrost for about 5 minutes. If you froze the ice-cream in the jar, you’ll have to have a little bit more patience, I would say, 15 minutes.