Dairy Free Chocolate Ice Cream (No Refined Sugars)

Creamy and chocolatey, it has the taste and look of real chocolate ice cream, but it has no dairy and no refined sugars. Score!

I’ve made ice cream in my Vitamix many times by using both bananas and ice as a base. While I love the recipes, they are more soft-serve or frozen yogurt style, and I wanted something scoop-able! This is the perfect recipe (though it had already melted a tad by the time I took my pictures).

After a few months of making the other recipes, I was longing for traditional chocolate ice cream. I just wanted a healthy chocolate ice cream that was creamy, not icy, and tasted like chocolate, not chocolate banana! It has no ice, so it does not have that “icy” consistency, and it has no bananas, so no banana flavor. The secret ingredient that makes it creamy? Coconut oil!

I’m envisioning a lot more ice cream flavors in the near future …

Ingredients:

• 1 cup unsweetened almond milk
• 1/2 cup coconut oil
• 2 TBSP cocoa powder
• 3 TBSP pure maple syrup (or honey, if you prefer)
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

Directions:

1. Combine all ingredients in a VitaMix and blend until thoroughly mixed (it may be best if the coconut oil is softened first, though I didn’t need to do that). Pour mixture into ice-cube trays and freeze until hard, at least 4 hours.
2. Place as many ice cream cubes into Vitamix as you want. With your Vitamix Tamper, blend on high and simultaneously push down hard. Mix just until creamy, acting fast enough as to not melt the ice cream. Use an ice-cream scoop to serve.

Serves 2 people

Note: If you do not have a Vitamix or other high-speed blender, it’s possible that you could make this in a food processor, but I have not personally tried this myself. Regular blenders cannot handle so much frozen food.

This recipe was shared on Traditional Tuesdays, Slightly Indulgent Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, Whatcha Whipped Up Wednesday, Allergy Free Wednesday, What’s Cooking Wednesday