How To Make The Snow Ice Cream That’s All Over TikTok

Who among us hasn’t looked at a fluffy pile of snow and thought, “I’m going to eat that”? Well, the deliciously cold fluff is a forbidden snack no longer as the internet has rediscovered the joy of snow ice cream. If you want to learn how to make snow ice cream, it's pretty simple. So, bundle up, grab your ice cream scoops, and prepare to live out your Laura Ingalls Wilder dreams.

There are a few different ways to make snow ice cream. Some say condensed milk works best. Other food blogs like Gimme Some Oven say any kind of milk will do. For those who worship the holy trinity of oat, almond, and soy milk, fear not because non-dairy milk works in snow ice cream, too. While each varies a bit, every recipe includes the same four basic ingredients:

• Vanilla extract
• Sugar
• Milk of your choice (evaporated milk and condensed milk also work)
• Snow (duh)

To ensure you’re not eating snow contaminated by the elements (read: animal pee), you may want to plan ahead a bit and set a bowl out to collect fresh snow. Once you’ve gathered a good bowlful of snow, the next steps take a bit of trial and error depending on the density, wetness, and general consistency of your snow. In general, you'll add a splash of vanilla, a couple tablespoons of sugar, and about a cup of milk for every eight-ish cups of snow. Again, exact measurements will vary based on how much snow you gather and how the snow mixes with the other ingredients.

From there, all you need to do is mix. You should absolutely take a note from food TikTok and add sprinkles, chocolate chips, and any other traditional ice cream toppings of choice. You could succumb to the inevitable and add a bit of Nutella. Maybe you want to get meta and top it with Sno-Caps. To each their own snow ice cream.

If you want to fully embrace your inner prairie girl, you can try making the snow candy from the Little House book series. It combines equal parts brown sugar and molasses, brought to a boil on the stove. Once the syrup reaches the “hard crack” candy stage, it's ready to be poured into snow. (You can test this by dropping a spoonful of syrup into cold water. If it forms a hard ball and cracks, it’s reached this stage.) When you drizzle the hot syrup into cold snow, you get drizzles of hard candy that taste similar to caramel.

In this, the year 2021 of our lord and savior Zoom, we’ve reverted to rather anachronistic means of entertainment. We’re caring for sourdough bread starters. We’ve rekindled our obsession with jigsaw puzzles. Snow ice cream was really only a matter of time.

Does snow ice cream taste exactly like ice cream? Not really. It's definitely icier and has a more slushie-like consistency. Like snow itself, it melts fairly quickly and doesn't really hold up the same way if you try to stick it in the freezer. Regardless, if you're looking for a fun and basically free way to spend a snowy day, then snow ice cream away.