It’s almost that time of year again – when Ben and Jerry’s goes on sale half price and Netflix adds just about every romcom ever invented to its collection. Spending Valentine’s Day alone almost always means reaching for the ice cream for some quality TV time, because it’s true that Phish Food and Gilmore Girls is all you really need. With the added bonus of pjs and lots of homemade cocktails, who even needs a love life?

Ice cream too often gets a bad rep as junk food, with all its sugar and heavy cream, leaving you feeling less than great when you realize you’ve made it through half the tub. But at the same time, eating chocolate can make everything better.

Introducing precisely the recipe that will let us have our ice cream and eat it too. Being dairy and refined sugar-free, it comes with zero guilt, and even has added health benefits from the main ingredient – bananas. With so few ingredients involved, it takes no effort at all, and chances are you have most of them in your cupboard already. So basically everyone is winning, apart from Ben and Jerry.

Chocolate Ice Cream

  • Prep Time:10 minutes
  • Cook Time:2 hours
  • Total Time:2 hours 10 minutes
  • Servings:2-3
  • Easy

    Ingredients

  • 2 bananas
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 1 cup cacao powder
  • 1 cup maple syrup
Photo by Lucy Jones
  • Step 1

    Chop the bananas into slices and place on a baking tray.

    Photo by Lucy Jones
  • Step 2

    Freeze the banana for 1 hour.

  • Step 3

    Mix the banana and all the other ingredients in a food processor until smooth.

    Photo by Lucy Jones
  • Step 4

    Freeze the mixture for another hour until set.

  • Step 5

    Spoon into a bowl and enjoy with some mint leaves sprinkled on top.

    Photo by Lucy Jones