Homemade ice cream isn’t just a fun project that ends with a bowl of your favorite sweet treat. It’s also the ultimate dessert to break out when you host summertime get-togethers. Everyone will be excited — we all do scream for ice cream, after all — and you’ll get to enjoy the spotlight of having made it. DIY ice cream allows you to get creative with your flavors as there are so many ingredients you can use in homemade ice cream, from fruit, cereal, and cake pieces to caramel, jam, and liqueur. Our personal favorite is candy — there are dozens of different texture and flavor possibilities. You can have fun with it, but keep in mind the right way to add mix-ins to your ice cream, and, most importantly, that some candies don’t do so well in ice cream.
Hard candy could be downright harmful to crunch down on. You might think of pulverizing it into a fruity crumb coating, but it tends to crush into jagged shards instead — ouch. Anything gummy, from Sour Patch Kids to Tootsie Rolls, is already chewy and will get downright challenging when it hardens in frigid temperatures. Same goes for caramel candies — caramel sauce, yes, but hard caramels, no — unless you’ve got your dentist on speed dial. Essentially, think about texture. You want pleasant toothsome-ness, crispness, crunch, and creaminess, with nothing rock-hard or tough.
Good candy-dates for your ice cream
Ruling out potentially tooth-shattering hard candies first, followed by unpleasantly chewy gummies, what candies are appealing ice cream mix-in contenders? Most chocolates are fair game, from the most popular bars to smaller bits like M&M’s and Reese’s Pieces. In fact, most of your options will fall in the chocolate wheelhouse — it’s more about considering their fillings and what flavor of ice cream you’re making. Pretty much anything will work with the creamy and delicious, yet relatively neutral vanilla. You may want to assign richer chocolate here and focus on lighter options with other elements for chocolate ice cream, like Kit Kats or Whoppers. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups jazz up vanilla but might be too much for peanut butter ice cream — a PayDay bar would bring in peanut crunch and sweet and salty caramel.
M&M’s and Kit Kats come in so many varieties, you could get your ice cream flavor ideas from them. The best M&M’s candy is obviously the pretzel variety; it will bring sweet milk chocolate, the crunch of the pretzels and its shell, and some salt to any flavor. Of the best Kit Kat flavors — many of which are from Japan — just imagine how good Café Au Lait would be in coffee ice cream, or Strawberry Gateau in strawberry, or Duos Mint and Chocolate in mint. For the ultimate of-the-moment move, make your own Dubai chocolate and mix it into pistachio ice cream.