🍦Fluffernutter Ice Cream

This no-churn recipe is the key to (almost) instant gratification

No-Churn Ice Cream is nothing new, but it might be the secret to happiness. I say that with full hyperbole, because, well - the world is a dumpster fire, and sometimes a super simple recipe that uses just three main ingredients (two of which are shelf-stable!) sorta feels like a dopamine hit to the brain.

The no-churn part means you get to skip straight to the good stuff —the mix-ins. No turning on the stove to warm anything through, no egg yolk separating, no special equipment needed, nada.

With this style of ice cream, your options of how to flavor it are wildly infinite and totally flexible. You can riff using whatever’s hanging around the pantry or at the bottom of your kid’s snack drawer.

Which is exactly what happened here.

Loosha has her own snack drawer. I know — bold parenting move! But she can grab her own peanut butter-filled pretzels and fruit leather, and when friends come over, they ransack it like hungry little gerbils, and I love that for her. So it’s not surprising that I had a few half-stale bags of Bamba (those peanut-buttery puff snacks that look like Cheetos but definitely aren’t) floating around.

I didn’t set out to make a fluffernutter-flavored ice cream. I just wanted to use up the snack drawer scraps, and what happened was better than I could’ve imagined. Turns out, two-week-old stale Bamba makes an excellent ice cream mix-in.

---

If you’re unfamiliar with fluffernutters… honestly, I feel sorry for you. It’s the oddly satisfying, borderline-gross combo of peanut butter + marshmallow fluff, spread onto the whitest white bread imaginable and served with absolutely no shame.

Marshmallow fluff (originally called marshmallow cream) was invented in Massachusetts in 1918 by confectioner Emma Curtis, who layered it with peanut butter on “war bread” and named it a Liberty Sandwich. The term fluffernutter didn’t show up until the 1960s — a rebrand courtesy of a clever ad agency.

Ironically, this ice cream doesn’t contain a single lick of marshmallow (though a few mini mallows certainly wouldn’t hurt). But the second I tasted it, I knew exactly what it was giving. The vanilla + condensed milk, mixed with whatever that stale Bamba texture was doing, and the swirls of peanut butter throughout - it all made my brain believe that it was in fact a fluffernutter flavor. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself!