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As a North East baby, I was practically weaned on ice cream from Pacitto’s, a North Sea-facing parlour of Italian heritage famed for their perfect whippy milk ice (topped with lemon sorbet for the full local experience). As a result, I take soft serve very seriously: it must be smooth without any granulation and it must taste like milk, not eggs, cream or vanilla. Experiences of being served inferior 99s (ice cream cones with a flake in it) over the years have sent me down various research rabbit holes.

A subreddit dedicated to ice cream shares woes of wannabe dairy queens who find it “impossible” to get right. Hardly surprising when you apparently need to take fat content, emulsifiers, milk solids, sugar content, texture of flavourings and optional stabilisers all into account. All of this is to say that, essentially, most soft serve is an industrial product and therefore I was very intrigued by the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker ICE48U, a machine that promises to deliver a “personalised ice cream parlour at home.



” The machine stands upright on the counter and features its own dispensing system: with a simple lever, you can twirl finished ice cream straight down from the frozen bowl on the top into your cone or bowl and even simultaneously top with your sprinkles of choice via the dispensers on the side. What’s more, you can keep your favourite sauce warm with the inbuilt warmer. But does it meet the dizzy heights of the perfect seaside cone? What’s good .

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