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Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker: one-minute review
If you can't get your hands on the Ninja Creami Swirl, the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker could be the next best thing. It isn't as advanced as the Ninja machine, but can produce a smooth and creamy dessert once you get used to its quirks.
Preparing your ice cream is straightforward, and Cuisinart provides a good online recipe book to get you started. However, you have to keep a very close eye on the machine to ensure you stop it when your mix reaches the right temperature. Stop it too late and you'll have to wait for it to melt, or pull the churning mechanism out and scoop your ice cream out with a spoon. It's not the end of the world, but a timer would help avoid such issues arising.
The miniature hot plate for keeping sauces or melted chocolate warm is a nice touch and works well, but I'd argue that there's no need for three different topping containers – particularly since the design of their dispensing mechanism means most candies are too large.
It can be fun to use, but it would be difficult to justify spending on the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream maker unless you eat frozen desserts several times a week. It's reasonably priced and often available at a discount, but it takes up a lot of valuable space in your kitchen
Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker: price and availability
- List price $179.95 / £200 / AU$249
- Sometimes available at a discount
- About half the price of Ninja Creami Swirl
The Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker has a list price of $179.95 / £200 / AU$249. It's available direct from Cuisinart's online store, and from third-party retailers such as Amazon. It's sometimes available for a discount, and you'll find all today's best prices below.
For comparison, the Ninja Creami Swirl comes in at almost twice the price at $349. At the time of writing (February 2025), international prices and availability had yet to be announced.
If you have a KitchenAid stand mixer, the ice cream maker attachment works in a similar way to the Cuisinart, using a frozen bowl and a rotary motor to churn your ingredients while they freeze, but it lacks a soft-serve dispenser. It retails for $99.99 / £149 / AU$209.
- Value score: 4.5/5
Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker: design
- Bulky, not very attractive
- Excellent mini hotplate for sauces
- Topping dispensers aren't ideal
The Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker is a large appliance, and at 17.7 inches / 45cm, it only just fit beneath my kitchen wall cabinets. Its footprint is relatively small though (9.4 x 11 inches / 24 x 28cm), which is more compact than a lot of coffee makers. You might not want to keep it on the kitchen counter at all times, though; its white plastic chassis is functional and easy to clean, but not a thing of great beauty.
From a mechanical perspective, it's quite simple. There's a double-insulated bowl that you freeze ahead of time, which cools your ingredients to freeze them as they're churned. When your ice cream is ready, simply switch off the motor, open a tap on the bottom, and the finished dessert pours out in a smooth stream (provided you've judged the timings correctly).
There are three removable topping containers on the top right of the machine, which I initially loaded with candy. Unfortunately, I later realized that they were only capable of dispensing very small items such as sprinkles due to the size of the mechanism inside. Toppings such as M&Ms or nuts will be too large, which is a shame. All three toppings are dispensed through a single funnel, which propels them into your ice cream as it pours. During my tests this mostly worked well, but some sprinkles ended up overshooting.
The Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker also has a small hotplate on the left-hand side of the bowl, with a little saucepan that you can use to melt a sauce to pour over your finished ice cream.
- Design score: 3.5 / 5
Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker: performance
Cuisinart's website has a good selection of simple recipes for the Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker, all of which can be adapted to suit your tastes. I started with the fresh strawberry ice cream, which is a mix of double cream, milk, hulled strawberries, lemon juice, and sugar.
You need to keep the bowl upright while it freezes, but I found it fitted in my freezer's deepest drawer quite easily, and I was able to stuff it with small frozen items to make good use of the space until I was ready to use it.
You'll need to blend your mix (take a look at our roundup of the best blenders, if you've been thinking about upgrading) then chill the mix for at least four hours before you start churning.
Once your mix is cold, it's time to begin. The frozen bowl fits easily into place inside the machine, then the lid with the churning mechanism clips on top. Once it's all in place, you start the machine using the switch on the left; make sure the lever is pushed up into the "closed" position, and pour your mix through the L-shaped hole in the top. I forgot to check the lever on my first attempt, which was a messy mistake.
The mini hotplate is activated by turning the control dial all the way to the right, and during testing it worked very well. It provides gentle heat while your ice cream churns, and will melt a cube or two of chocolate by the time your dessert is ready.
Unlike the Ninja Creami Swirl, the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker relies on gravity to dispense your ice cream, so it needs to be just the right consistency. If you allow the mix to chill too long, it will fail to flow through the dispenser, and eventually the churning mechanism will stop turning. This won't break the machine, but you'll need to wait for the ice cream to thaw a little before you can continue, or remove the lid and churning mechanism (which can be tricky if the ice cream has become stiff) and scoop out the dessert instead.
For best results, don't churn for longer than 20 minutes. If I wasn't sure that I'd achieved the right consistency, I found it helpful to turn off the machine, then use a spoon to scoop some of the mixture out of the bowl to assess its thickness. A programmable timer would be a good addition to avoid accidentally over-chilling the mix.
I also found that the blades didn't quite reach all the way to the edge of the bowl, which created a layer of hardened ice cream that wouldn't dispense. This was difficult to remove with a spoon without thawing everything completely.
- Performance score: 3.5 / 5
Should you buy the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker
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Value | Almost half the price of the Ninja Creami Swirl, although if you have a KitchenAid mixer, the ice cream attachment is cheaper. | 4.5/5 |
Design | Functional, but not a thing of great beauty. Churning mechanism is robust and mini hotplate is a great little addition; but topping dispensers can only handle small sprinkles. | 3.5/5 |
Performance | Makes creamy soft-serve, but you have to catch it at exactly the right point. A timer would be helpful to help avoid over-freezing. | 3.5/5 |
Buy it if
You eat a lot of ice cream
Large single-use appliances such as this are tricky to justify unless you'll be using them frequently. If you're more of an occasional dessert fan, an attachment for your stand mixer may be a more economical choice.
You have kids
Custom ice creams with different toppings will definitely appeal to youngsters (or to your inner child).
Don't buy it if
You're easily distracted in the kitchen
This isn't the kind of appliance you can set and forget. You'll need to watch the consistency of your ice cream closely to make sure it's just right.
You have a small kitchen
This is a bulky machine that will take up a lot of room on your counter, or in a cupboard.
Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker: also consider
Ninja Creami Swirl
The hugely popular soft-serve ice cream maker isn't available outside the US at the time of writing, but it's definitely more advanced than the Cuisinart machine (particularly its dispenser).
KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker
If you have a KitchenAid stand mixer, this freezable bowl and churning attachment will do basically the same job as the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker, for less cash. You don't get the dispenser nozzle, though.
How I tested the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker
I used the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker to prepare several recipes from Cuisinart's website, including soft-serve ice cream and sorbet. I tested the hotplate with different types of chocolate, and tried various sprinkles and candies in the topping dispensers.
For more details. see how we test, review, and rate products at TechRadar.
First reviewed February 2025
English (US) ·