 Did you know that President Ronald Reagan designated the third Sunday of July as National Ice Cream Day? Well, he did. And so today we are making some strawberry, fresh strawberry ice cream that is gluten-free, it's paleo, it's dairy-free, and it's delicious. Now for me, I want my ice cream to be nice and creamy and just decadent. That's what we're going to do today and our base for this is going to be coconut milk and cashews. So, stay tuned. I'm Rockin' Robin and I'm going to show you how to make it right after this. So let's go over our ingredients and I'll show you what's in this. First up, we have our coconut milk. Now you want to use full-fat coconut milk because fat is super important for a nice, creamy, rich consistency. So, and I've refrigerated these and we'll show you the rest of that later. I have some cashews, these are raw cashews that I have been soaking for about two and a half, three hours. You want to soak them for quite a while so that they're nice and soft and then they will blend up and dissolve pretty much into our mixture. We have some fresh strawberries. I have some arrowroot here that is sort of a thickener that's going to kind of keep things nice and keep it together. Now to sweeten this up, I'm using maple syrup and some regular white sugar. I'm using a combination and how much sugar I'm going to use is going to depend on how sweet my strawberries are. I need a little bit of salt and some vanilla extract. So to make this recipe, you want to use an ice cream maker. I have a Cuisinart right over here and that's the type that has the little insert that you put in the freezer for 24 hours before you make your ice cream. So to start our recipe, we're going to take our cashews, like I said, they've been soaking for hours now. We want them to be nice and soft and I'm just going to drain the water out and we're going to place those into the Vitamix mixer. You want to get these cashews blended up so that you don't even know that they're there. They need to be very, very fine and if you don't get them really fine, your ice cream is going to turn out a little bit gritty and we don't want that, right? We're shooting for super creamy here. So then I'm going to take the coconut milk, full fat, remember you want to use full fat and we're going to place that in the blender. Now with the second can of coconut milk, I refrigerated it remember and so what that does is it sort of separates the fat from the water and so I took out just the fat of that one and added it to the blender. Now that makes about 21 ounces of coconut milk, which works really well in our recipe and it fits in our ice cream maker. Alright, so we got that in there. Now I'm going to go ahead and place the maple syrup. Now I'm going to add just a portion of the sugar because I'm not so sure how sweet my strawberries are yet so I'm going to pour some of that in, maybe half of it and then we'll add those later and we'll test it. Okay, so now a little bit of vanilla extract. We'll put that with a little pinch of salt and the arrowroot. Now we're going to blend this up really well so that those cashews are, they dissolve. Now with a Vitamix it doesn't take very long to do that, maybe a minute, maybe less. If you have a regular blender go ahead and plan on mixing that for probably a couple of minutes at least until you get that nice smooth texture. And I'm going to taste it right now just to see how creamy that is. Alright, we need to go a little bit longer. Sweetness is good. Super creamy. No detection of any nuts in there at all. Perfect. So now we can add the strawberries. Now you don't want to over mix these either. But you want to make sure that the chunks of strawberries are not too large. Because if they're large what you're going to end up with is, you know, strawberry ice cream that has these hard chunks that are icy and not too desirable. So we do want to mix this up pretty well. Alright, so I'm going to put this into some mason jars. We need to chill this down. It's got to be really cold, you know, maybe three or four hours. Overnight's better. I'm going to use an ice bath to speed things up and put it in smaller containers. So like I said, we'll put these in the refrigerator and we'll come back when these are chilled enough to put in our ice cream maker. Now it's time to churn the ice cream. So I took out my insert from the freezer. I'm going to put my little, this is a little churner thing that goes in there. I'm going to turn on first before I add the ice cream mixture and that's supposed to help it keep it from, you know, getting really rock hard right in the beginning. Alright, so the ice cream is done in just 15 minutes on my machine. Everything was chilled so I think that's why it firmed up. Let's get that out of there. I've got my two dishes here that I'm going to be placing this in. Look at this, this all came out. Look at that, maybe I'll only need one. It's nice and soft and I have to admit I did try some already and I'm loving it. You know, this is going to melt quick, especially under the lights here, but I'm going to smooth it out. Let's get the rest of this in here and then we'll get this in the freezer. Like I said, I've tasted it already. In fact, I'm going to taste it again right now. I'll just tell you because I got to get it in the freezer. This is totally, totally smooth and creamy, rich tasting, strawberry tasting. The strawberries I used were really ripe so they have some really nice flavor to them, not just sweetness but just good strawberry flavor. So I'm going to cover that up and get it in the freezer right away and a little bit later I'll serve some up. One of the biggest complaints that you might have about making homemade ice cream is that it gets rock hard in the freezer after it's sitting in there for a day or two, right? Really super hard to get out. What you can do there is you can add some alcohol to it if you want to. I've never tried that so I don't know if it works or how good it is, but they say you can add a couple of tablespoons of, say, vodka because vodka has no flavor, you won't even notice that it's in there and alcohol doesn't freeze so that's supposed to keep your ice cream soft. Well, let me know if you try it and leave it down in the comments. I'd love to hear it. Now the other thing you can do is to store your ice cream in a shallow dish and that's supposed to keep it from getting rock hard. Kind of makes sense, right? It's not so dense so that's what I'm going to do and also a lot of times you'll find that it gets icy on the top of your ice cream which is undesirable in my view. I like it creamy so you can prevent that by taking a piece of saran wrap and placing it right on top of the ice cream so that it's touching it and then put your lid on it and store it that way and that should really keep the ice away. And then as a last alternative, as far as getting your ice cream soft is you can just let it sit out and thaw for just 10, 15 minutes, whatever it takes so that you can scoop it out. So thanks so much for watching everybody. I hope you enjoyed it. Go out and have some ice cream for a national ice cream day. What's your favorite flavor? I'd love to hear that down below in the comments. Let me know and let me know if you're going to try this recipe. If you'd like to subscribe to my channel go ahead and click the subscribe button right up here at the end of the video and there's one down below and also there's the bell down there and you want to click that bell so that you'll be notified every week when my new videos come out. No one should have missed any. Alright, thanks again for watching. Happy Ice Cream Day and we'll see you next time. Bye.