Jump to Recipe

Capture the last of Summer with this bright and fruity homemade ice cream recipe that requires no fancy machinery!

TLDR: How to Make Fruity Homemade Ice Cream:

1. Chop up fruit and freeze
2. Melt honey into cream over med-low heat, freeze in ice cube trays
3. Combine frozen fruit and sweet cream in food processor
4. Adjust for taste

Why Homemade Ice Cream with Autumnal Fruit Matters to Me

Everyone says it’s officially Fall, but here where I live, I’m still eating hot soup while wearing shorts and anticipating a dry and smoky fire season ahead. Autumnal homemade ice cream is a creative way to capture the taste of the season while also surviving it – especially if you’re stuck indoors due to smoke. This time of year when the heat just won’t give up, but I still want to stay connected to nature and the season – I lean into this easy homemade ice cream recipe using the last of the Summer stone fruit and berries. This is the perfect transitional recipe to help bridge the gap until it actually feels like Fall.

This ice cream recipe isn’t decadent and heavy – it’s bright and vibrant and packed with flavor. It’s a simple way to capture that classic fruity “last of Summer” taste. You simply will not find anything like it in stores! Plus, imagine perking up hot Thanksgiving desserts with bright, fruity ice cream flavors! A slice of warm pumpkin pie with a scoop of creamy plum ice cream, topped with homemade whipped cream and pomegranate seeds? Yes, please!

This is the most simple ice cream recipe ever. You don’t need any fancy machinery or equipment, except for a food processor and some muffin trays. It’s a combination of whatever dairy you prefer, fruit, and honey. For me, the creamier the better, so I’ll share with you a lightly sweetened recipe using lots of organic half and half (I usually get 1/2 gallons from Costco). The point is to make this by taste, using your intuition, so please adjust sweetness and creaminess how it feels right for you. 

Ingredients

64 oz half and half (or your milk of choice)

1.5 cups honey (or your sweetener of choice)*

2 quarts chopped fruit – you guessed it, of your choice!

*Remember that honey is about 25% sweeter than regular sugar, so if you do use sugar, you may want to account for that by adding 25% more. 

Important Notes About Making Homemade Fruity Ice Cream

You’ll need a food processor, and space in your freezer. (I actually put another freezer in the garage just to make this ice cream – is that crazy?). You can also use a blender, but the squat-ness of the food processor allows the blade to blend better with more surface area. 

To prep, fruit will need to be frozen, and a sweet creamy mix will separately need to be frozen. You can do these on different days if it fits better into your schedule. Eventually you’ll need containers to store the ice cream.

Preparation of Homemade Fruity Ice Cream

Step 1

Start by snagging your favorite fruit from the farmers market or favorite grocery – or your own back yard! You really can use almost anything: strawberries, plums, peaches, apricots, blackberries. Just don’t do apples or anything super fibrous (ask me how I know!). 

Process the fruit by chopping into ~1”-2” hunks, and freezing them in ziplock bags or on cookie trays lined with parchment paper. I use ziplock bags because that allows me freedom to make the ice cream later when I have spaciousness in my schedule, and not manage a bunch of cookie sheets in the meantime. The most important thing is to capture and freeze the fruit while we still have it available.

This is a whole job, so don’t stress yourself out or pressure yourself. Just enjoy cutting up the fruit that only comes this time of year, and admiring how ridiculously beautiful it is!

Step 2

When you feel like it next, make the sweet cream mix:

Warm up the cream and honey in a pot over low-medium heat, enough to melt the honey, but not enough to boil the milk. You accidentally boiled the milk? No problem, just remember to strain it before freezing it, to remove those gooey bits that congeal at the top and bottom of the pot after high heating. 

Basically you just want the honey to completely dissolve. This may require some taste tests, at which point you may think WHOA. WAY. TOO. SWEET. Worry not, it won’t be – because frozen fruit is not as sweet as fresh, so it’ll even out later when mixed.

Pour the sweet cream mix into whatever you’ve got that’ll fit in your freezer, stacked at about 1-2” thicknesses: cookie trays, ice cube trays, muffin trays, whatever. Layer in the freezer, and wait about a day +/- for the sweet cream mix to completely freeze. 

Step 3

The day has come and you’re ready to finally make the ice cream. When you’re ready, pull out some fruit and some sweet cream mix from the freezer. Into the food processor, add equal parts fruit and cream mix if you like it creamy, or 1 part cream to 2 parts fruit if you like more fruit flavor. Mix in food processor until completely smooth. Taste. What do you think? More cream? If so, then this is the time to pour in unfrozen cream from your fridge and mix again. More sweetener? Add more sugar (remember, honey hardens when cold so it may be better to use sugar here). More fruit? You get the picture. Just get it how you like it.

You can eat it super soft right now, or throw it in containers in the freezer to harden it up more. After hardening up, let it soften for a few minutes before eating.

Also, please tell me what you try. I’m genuinely interested in what fruits are the best for this recipe. Could one use persimmons in the late Fall? Blood oranges in the Winter?