Ice Cream At Your Whim With NewAir AIC-210 Ice Cream Maker

Ice Cream in De­cem­ber seems a bit counter-in­tu­itive, at least where we sit, hid­ing from the cold winds of NYC (we're as­sured that this is just the be­gin­ning). On the oth­er hand, it's nice and toasty in here, and the idea of ice cream on a waf­fle with hot melt­ed choco­late driz­zled over it sounds rather ap­peal­ing. Or a scoop of ice cream in hot choco­late… Now if on­ly we didn't need to ven­ture out­side to find good ice-cream… En­ter the NewAir AIC-210 Ice Cream Mak­er - a com­mer­cial qual­i­ty one quart ice cream mak­er.

Imag­ine be­ing able to make home-made ice-cream when­ev­er you want. Though not com­plete­ly in­stant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, it's pret­ty close: as­sem­ble your in­gre­di­ents, put them in, set the timer for 60 min. Poof! As­sum­ing that you put in ap­pro­pri­ate con­tents for ice cream, frozen yo­gurt or sor­bet, it's yours to con­sume. The ma­chine comes with a stain­less steel buck­et, so you can lift out and serve from there.

We'll ad­mit to feel­ing a bit nos­tal­gic for the ice cream mak­ers of our child­hoods- the love­ly round­ed wood, the huge bag of rock salt, tak­ing turns crank­ing the han­dle in the back yard while spit­ting wa­ter­mel­on seeds at each oth­er. On the oth­er hand, that took hours, and we doubt our ur­ban neigh­bors would ap­pre­ci­ate ran­dom bits of wa­ter­mel­on in front of the build­ings. This mak­er, un­like oth­er ice cream mak­ers, is good to go as is, with­out re­quir­ing pre-freez­ing of the bowl, or oth­er such non­sense. Aes­thet­i­cal­ly it cer­tain­ly doesn't have the charm of old­er mak­ers, but it is clean and stream-lined look­ing (and sig­nif­i­cant­ly eas­i­er to clean).

When con­sid­er­ing this as a gift, our on­ly hes­i­ta­tion is size. If you're look­ing for some­thing for some­one with a huge kitchen and lots of stor­age, it's fan­tas­tic, es­pe­cial­ly if they're re­al­ly in­to dessert. On the oth­er hand, for more com­pact city dwellers, this gift can be a bit of a prob­lem. Still, we find our­selves drawn to it. It's a great way to put an im­pres­sive spin on dessert when you have a din­ner par­ty. At $200 it's not a gift to get ev­ery­one on your list, but for the right per­son, it'll be sweet.