We are here to make a case for eating lots and lots of ice cream in the winter. To help convince you, we reached out to provide some brilliant tips for giving ice cream a winter upgrade.
1. Winter is a great time to make ice creams with cakes, pralines, and cookies layered in… We wants you to load your ice cream with delicious things because it’s winter and hopefully your diets are all out the window. It’s a relatively simple way to make an ice cream into a dinner party-worthy dessert.
2. You don’t even have to make the ice cream or mix-ins yourself. Buy an ice cream and mix with sauce and bits of cookies, cakes, or pralines (you can buy these too). We like to crush them up in 1/2-inch crumbles and add a bit of sauce like caramel, chocolate, or jam to moisten them. You just want to coat the crumbles, not too much or too little. The sauce will adhere to the cakes or cookies and keep it binded together while you layer it in the ice cream.
3. Make a frozen banana pudding. Take a mixture of broken, crushed, or crumbled shortbread or vanilla cookies and just enough caramel sauce to hold them together. Layer the blend into fresh banana ice cream for something like a frozen banana pudding. There’s a great recipe for banana ice cream, or try the recipe of Spiced Banana Ice Cream.
4. Put some booze in your ice cream. Make honey cake ice cream, start with softened vanilla ice cream. Crumble a slice of yellow cake into 1/2-inch bits. Combine a few teaspoons of honey in a small cup and pour just enough of the mixture over the cake crumbles, just until the cake is slightly moistened. (Don’t use too much. If you do, the ice cream you’re making won’t re-freeze.) Let it soak for a few minutes, and then gently mix the cake mixture into the softened ice cream. Put the mixture in the freezer to harden.

“Ready to become a master winter ice cream mixer? Check out these recipes for decadent homemade mix-ins, but remember there’s no shame in store-bought…”