Switch your ice cream maker on and ensure the paddle is running. Pour the mixture through the ingredient chute into the freezer bowl.

After a lot of careful research, I ended up buying an Andrew James Ice Cream Makerand I’m really happy with it. It is a really good budget buy – if you have more to spend then I would go for a model with a built in freezer, but that is all explained in the guide mentioned above, so I won’t repeat it allagain here. We’re big fans of the design, too. It comes in a lovely, soft pistachio colour and is fairly compact, so it won’t be an eyesore on your kitchen counter. For tasty ice cream, gelato, smoothie bowls and milkshakes in a flash, you can’t get much better than the Ninja Creami. This multi-functional ice cream maker flips the classic churning process on its head, by getting you to pre-freeze your mixture for 24 hours before churning. Once frozen, ice cream only takes two and a half minutes to churn, rather than the 25 to 30 minutes plus 24 hours pre-freeze time you’d expect from traditional style makers. If you are making an ice cream with alcohol in (keep an eye out for our Baileys Ice Cream coming up soon!) remember that alcohol inhibits the freezing process.Better still, many ice cream makers allow you to do so much more than simply make ice cream. There are options to create ice drinks, frozen yoghurt, sorbet and more. Our biggest criticism is that it only makes one litre of ice cream at a time, but its excellent features more than make up for this. Handy tips from Heston Blumenthal are included, along with tasty 16 recipes. The built-in freezer means there’s no need to pre-freeze the mixing bowl, which makes prep time much easier.

Once the pre-freeze stage is complete though, it makes ice cream, sorbets, frozen yoghurt or indeed frozen fruit in as little as 25 minutes. What’s more, if you want to jazz up your ice cream with other ingredients such as chocolate chips or fruit pieces, these can be added mid-churn through the machine’s lid.

What happened to Andrew James UK Ltd?

A simple and well-priced ice cream maker, the Judge JEA57 has a single coolant-filled bowl that you can store in the freezer. Once the bowl has been in a freezer for a minimum of eight hours, this machine can make up to 1.5-litres of sorbet, ice cream or frozen yoghurt in 20-to-40 minutes. The liquid-filled 1.9-litre bowl requires pre-freezing for 15 hours and the mixture itself needs an 8-hour pre chill. The Heath Robinson-esque paddle attachment then mixes the results to a delightful consistency.