One of the best features about this product is its overall simplicity and user-friendly approach to making dessert. While there are other ice cream makers that can be quite complicated, this one is self-explanatory. All of the parts connect easily without a bunch of unnecessary buttons and features causing confusion. After all, when it comes to ice cream all you want is a delicious final product that you can eat right away. There’s no need to mess around with various settings if you’re cooking a basic recipe.

Keep in mind that this model will require you to freeze the bowl in your refrigerator before you begin mixing the ingredients. It’s just something you have to get used to because this isn’t a completely automated freezing machine. So make sure that you have your bowl frozen before you start making your custard. Otherwise you’ll have to wait a couple of hours for your bowl to freeze afterwards.

You can find any good recipe on the Internet these days, and you’ll be able to mix basic flavors for an ice cream recipe in about 20 minutes. After you pour your custard into the pre-frozen bowl, the Cuisinart will churn the ingredients with a specially designed paddle that gets the best results. And since the top is open for this particular machine, you can watch the action as it happens. You’ll also be able to throw in extra ingredients like fruit or chocolate, and this is a great way to turn an average flavor into something truly special.

Overall, this Cuisinart ice cream machine is easy to maintain it will live up to all of your ice cream making expectations. As you get more experience you’ll find that you can get faster at the process. When your family helps out, you can turn it into a fun activity after dinner, and it won’t be long before everyone is digging into a fresh bowl of yummy ice cream. This is definitely something that will pay for itself after a while, and you’ll love the way it produces your favorite ice cream recipes.

Still, we can’t change ‘what is’ and looking at the way in which we’re spending money on updating our new home in general, not to mention soft furnishings and so on, we’re going to be lucky not to find ourselves foreclosed six months down the line! Joking apart, we do need a new juicer and a replacement Kitchenaid mixer, simply because ours have more than done their duty and it’s time they were retired. In fact … they’ve been retired!

We had our mixer for some 12 years, and the juicer has lasted 4. Not quite as long as our trusty stand mixer but the juicer has seen daily action almost since the day we bought it. Ours was a Breville ‘Juice Fountain’ model and it was certainly worth the initial outlay. We’re all big fans of good food and healthy lifestyles (in our house) and we all have our favorite juicer-concoctions.

Mine happens to be one of the usual suspects – banana and strawberry but the rest of my family are a bit more ambitious. Some of the stuff that’s been put through the Breville has probably shortened its lifespan just a little. Now we’re looking for something even more substantial, maybe one of the Omega models. Basically we need one that will cope with both fruit and vegetables (sometimes both in the same blend) so we’re looking to buy single gear ‘masticating’ juicer this time around.

We’re probably going to head out this weekend and pick up both the juicer and the Kitchenaid, and all being well that should cover the small kitchen appliances ‘hole’ we seem to have in the kitchen right now. I’m also hoping that we stumble on some kind of deal, as we’re looking at parting with something like $700 for the pair. Right now I’m going back to checking out consumer reviews and hunting down some coupons that we can use in order to reduce the big bucks prices we’d otherwise be paying!