Whipped Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream

The goodness of strawberry cheesecake in ice cream form, lightened up, but still just as luscious and creamy.

I’ve been craving ice cream SO badly lately! And it’s berry season. The perfect time for strawberry ice cream.

… but the funny thing is at the beginning, I didn’t set out to make ice cream. One day, when I was out shopping, I picked up what I thought was a half gallon of whipping cream, intending to make some whipped cream for a great big strawberry trifle for my mom for mother’s day. The trifle was an attempt to use up an Irish cream cake that I’d made that admittedly wasn’t the best cake in the world. (Sometimes you gotta try something new and sometimes it doesn’t work out as good as you had hoped.) The cake was acceptable covered in frosting AND strawberry sauce, but otherwise a little dry. My daughter tried it and my son did his best to polish it off, but it got drier and drier as the days wore on and he eventually gave up and I told him it was okay not to eat all of the cake. I’d find another use for it.

Unfortunately, when I got home, I realized that what I had grabbed while I was out wasn’t whipping cream … it was half and half. Sigh. Can you even make whipped cream with half and half? I found one blogger who claimed you could substitute half and half if you added melted butter to it. I thought this idea MIGHT have promise … so I decided to try it and yeah, you know what’s wrong with that idea? Melted butter is WARM and whipped cream needs to be COLD, so what you end up with is, um, bubbly cream with butter specks. It fluffed up really nicely just enough to get my hopes up, but then as soon as I stopped whipping, it started to settle back down and liquefy. I decided to take my failed half and half whipped cream and make it into strawberry cheesecake ice cream. It was amazing! Light and fluffy and creamy, with bits of strawberries. No, I didn’t try to mimic the crust of a cheesecake. The cheesecake flavor was quite enough to fuel my happy zone.

I loved how light and fluffy the ice cream was. The little bubbles in there made the ice cream stay soft even after sitting in the freezer for several hours.

I ended up making the cake into a sort of bread pudding (cake pudding?) with a strawberry sauce. That became my Mother’s Day gift for my mom. The ice cream became my gift to ME.

So after a failed cake and a failed whipped cream, I ended up with two pretty stellar desserts. The cake pudding was delightful, but I didn’t get any good pics before I carted it off to give to my mom, along with a little jar of strawberry sauce. She and dad loved it. You’ll just have to believe me. (Perhaps someday I’ll make it again, but it’s really just bread pudding made with cake in place of bread.)

Since I hadn’t kept track of the ingredients I used to make the ice cream the first time and it’s a really hot windy day, I made my strawberry cheesecake ice cream all over again, skipping the butter this time, adding a bit of REAL whipping cream, to help it whip up a little better. I think you’ll love this version. It’s brought me a lot of joy.

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