Rich and creamy cotton candy ice cream with the perfect ice cream texture. Easy to make at home with or without an ice cream machine!

This cotton candy ice cream is such a treat. It tastes just like cotton candy so it makes you feel like you’re at a summer carnival! No matter what time of year it is.

It’s also so easy to make with simple ingredients. If you have an ice cream machine you can churn it, but if you don’t have an ice cream machine it makes a perfect no-churn ice cream too. We have instructions for both methods in the recipe card.

And if you love making homemade ice creams then you’ll also love our peppermint ice cream and our Oreo ice cream recipes.

What Goes Into This Ice Cream Recipe:

Ingredient Notes

• Heavy cream – creates the thick and creamy base for this ice cream. You can also use whipping cream, so long as it’s a thickened cream, it will work well in this recipe.
• Food coloring – is optional but great to create the ‘look’ of cotton candy. So for this reason, pinks or blues work best. To get the exact shade of blue you can see in our photos we used a mix of 4 drops Americolor Royal Blue gel food coloring and 2 drops Americolor Violet gel food coloring as that is what we had on hand. I think Americolor Sky Blue gel food coloring would also work great.
• Cotton candy flavoring – we used cotton candy flavoring to add all that cotton candy flavor!
• Sweetened condensed milk – this recipe uses one 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk. It must be sweetened condensed milk because this is the only source of sweetness in the recipe.

How To Make Cotton Candy Ice Cream

Full instructions and measurements can always be found in the recipe card at the bottom of the post. This is a summary of the process to go along with the process photos.

• Add heavy cream to the bowl of your stand mixer and whip it until you have stiff peaks.

• Add sweetened condensed milk, cotton candy flavoring and blue food coloring and whip in until thickened.

• If you don’t have an ice cream machine then simply transfer the ice cream mix to a 9×5 loaf pan and smooth down. Cover with foil and freeze.
• If you do have an ice cream machine then transfer the ice cream mix to your ice cream machine and churn until it reaches a thick soft serve consistency.

• Then transfer it to a 9×5 loaf pan and smooth down. Cover with foil and freeze until set.

• Scoop and serve!

Chef’s Tips

Heavy cream must be cold and straight from the fridge. Otherwise it may not whip properly.

Don’t over-mix it. We made the mistake of letting the mixer run too long with one particular batch of ice cream and the cream started to turn into butter! So don’t turn your back on it and mix it just long enough to thicken.

Taste test. It’s best to start off by adding 1 teaspoon of cotton candy flavoring and then see if you’d like to make the flavor stronger. Different brands of flavoring may also have different strengths. So start slow and then add more as needed.

Churn or No-Churn. If you don’t have an ice cream machine then this ice cream works GREAT as a no-churn recipe. The difference between the churned ice cream and no-churn ice cream is extremely small, there is maybe a 2% difference in texture. The churned version is just ever so slightly more ‘light and fluffy’ so if you do have an ice cream machine you might as well use it, but if you don’t then no worries at all.

Recipe FAQ

More Delicious Homemade Ice Cream Recipes

1. Oreo Ice Cream
2. Biscoff Ice Cream
3. Red Velvet Ice Cream
4. Peppermint Ice Cream
5. Cookies and Cream Nice Cream
6. Carrot Ice Cream

Did you make this recipe? Be sure to leave a comment and rating below.