I can’t seem to find ice cream (helado, en español) that I like at any of our local grocery stores. I don’t eat ice cream very often but when I do it has to be delicious. My choices in town either have artificial sweeteners snuck in or high fructose corn syrup, ugh. I don’t eat either of those sweeteners. Frankly the HFCC surprised me because you don’t see it in many Mexican foods, unlike the U.S. I find sucralose in many of the Mexican processed foods like sodas and bakery junk food. You have to read the label because it’s hidden there without any mention about reduced sugar anywhere in the title.

La gringa’s struggle is real: I can’t find ice cream and I don’t have an ice cream churner/freezer. In true Baja kitchen hacks form, an Internet search ensued and a recipe was created.

I tried a simple vanilla recipe that uses whipped cream, sweetened condensed milk and vanilla. It was like eating frozen whipping cream which should have been delicious but frankly it’s so rich and fatty as to be unpleasant. In my experiments I found that the Mexican brand of whipping cream aka crema de batir doesn’t whip into firm peaks which it turns out doesn’t really matter much.

Back to the drawing room where I searched my cupboards and found coconut cream purchased at the liquor store, limes and pineapple juice and the  piña colada, no churn ice cream was born.
The taste was very good and reminescent of a piña colada and the lime cut through the richness of the creams but the sweetened coconut cream and pineapple juice have more water content so my ice cream was too solid and wouldn’t scoop. The experiment wasn’t a complete disaster because mi gringo cut it into squares and never complained once.
I’m taking my square ice cream to Fiesta Friday with co-hosts Mollie https://frugalhausfrau.com/ and Ginger http://www.gingerandbread.com/

Piña Colada No Churn Ice Cream

Ingredients:
2 cups whipping cream (crema para batir)
1 cup sweetened coconut cream (crema de coco)
1/2 cup pineapple juice (jugo de piña)
2 tablespoons key lime juice (jugo de limon)

Recipe:
Chill all ingredients. Whip cream into firm peaks. Whip coconut cream until soft peaks form. Stir pineapple and lime juices into coconut and then fold whipping cream into the coconut cream mixture. Spoon into a shallow glass dish and cover. Freezer until semi-solid or longer. Cut into squares to serve or leave out of the freezer until soft enough to scoop.

I’m tempted to blend a square with some rum for a tasty adult beverage.

Enjoy. I’m taking my ice cream flop to Fiesta Friday.

Whipping the cream. After 20 minutes, I gave up on trying to whip it into peaks. It might have been too warm in the house or the preservatives interfered. I have given up trying to understand kitchen flops in Mexico.

Surprise, the chilled coconut cream whipped better than the whipping cream.

Frozen piña colada squares!