Making Ice Cream in a Sandwich Bag

Making ice cream in a sandwich bag kind of changed our lives.

People. Making ice cream is the best toddler activity EVER.

Have you ever made ice cream in a sandwich bag? Because it is a HOOT and recently saved a meltdown of a morning so it gets my highest rating of: zomg, I’m so glad we did this.

Of course, by doing this, my toddler now knows ice cream can be made in mere minutes. I’ve accidentally divided his life into the time “before we made ice cream” and the time “after we made ice cream”. Kind of like BC and AD but for a toddler who just found out he can make ice cream in a bag.

This toddler activity has so many winning elements: it’s part science, part gross motor skills, and all delicious.

Materials:
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Sandwich bags
Salt (this link is for rock salt but table salt works too)
Milk or cream – not gonna lie, cream is way better. Almond milk works too!

The easy steps…plus one big step!

Take a sandwich sized bag and fill it with 1/2 cup cream and some chocolate syrup (if you want it plain, sub out the syrup for some vanilla but add some sugar. Trust me….)
Seal it beyond tight.
Place that bag inside another sandwich bag – we are double bagging here.
Put that double bagged mixture inside a gallon bag.
Fill the gallon bag with lots and lots of ice. Then add more ice.
Add 1/4 cup salt to the ice.
Seal it up.
Place into a grocery bag (it gets wicked cold and this helps).

Here’s the fun part that we added

You need to shake this bag and shake it good. That can only mean one thing: a Toddler-Mom dance party. You need to shake it for 8 minutes vigorously or about 2 dance songs.

The bag does get unbelievably cold so the plastic grocery bag really helps. Shake, toss, and roll! Get this mixed!

This ice cream can turn a whole day around

I can’t begin to tell you how much this changed the tone of our day. We had been having one of “those” days and this made everything so much better.

We had something fun to do, a memory was made, and a little learning went on too. Making ice cream saved the day.

When you’re done dancing, carefully remove the inner most bag (be super careful not to get any of the ice/salt water into the bag – bleh). Inside that bag is your ice cream, kind of a soft serve consistency. It does need to be eaten immediately because it starts to melt pretty fast.

My son says this toddler activity is “deeeeelish” and I say you gotta do this. The next time things are going south, bust out a few sandwich bags, have a dance party, eat ice cream together and make one heck of a memory.