Vegan roasted banana ice cream

A friend of mine who's lactose intolerant had a birthday this week, so I decided to make him some ice cream that he could eat even if he didn't have his lactase pills on hand.

The recipe I used was, as it turned out, based on a recipe from The Perfect Scoop. Or rather, it was based on a recipe based on a recipe from The Perfect Scoop.

The ingredients

The only ingredients were bananas, dates, vanilla extract (a whole tablespoon!), a bit of coconut oil, and coconut milk. You drizzle the bananas and dates with the coconut oil and vanilla, and then roast them. Then you blend together all the ingredients. Pretty easy.

But the taste... meh.

Maybe if I were a non-sugar eating vegan, I'd love it. But as someone who appreciates cream and sugar, I just wasn't into this stuff.

The recipe had some good parts. The roasting bananas made the house smell great. The batter tasted intensely and authentically banana-like, for better or worse. The mix set up quickly; after just 15 minutes, the whole thing was stuck to the churning paddle. Also, since the recipe used only 2 dates, we were able to enjoy lots of almond-stuffed dates. Yum!

But I just didn't like the overall flavor of the ice cream. It had a long lasting, bitter aftertaste, like the stringy bit of a banana. Maybe that's an anomaly—the fault of the bananas and not the recipe.

I consoled myself by making the super lemon ice cream from The Perfect Scoop. Such a perfect flavor.

Lemons from our backyard tree

I also made a marshmallow sauce that, as promised, made the ice cream taste like a lemon meringue pie. I'll probably stick with a healthier, easier raspberry sauce in the future, but it was fun to make the candy sauce, just this once.

Cosmo says when you heat this in the microwave, it puffs up. Must try.

So my friend got 2 pints of ice cream, plus some marshmallow sauce. One of the pints he can eat any time but might not like, and the other he'll need lactase for... but it's worth it.

I gave him the ice cream in a bag I found in the local fancy foodware shop.

The bag that kept the ice cream cold on BART

The perfect size for 2 pints!

Once the bitter aftertaste of the vegan recipe is a distant memory, I plan to try the original recipe for roasted banana ice cream, with all of its butter, sugar, and cream. Mmmm...

May 24 update: I made the original recipe, and here's the review. It's better, but still not my favorite.