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Overall Rating

great idea, horrible execution
I got this for Christmas and while I use it every night, and *really* like the ice cream/topping combos that come out, the design of the product is really terrible.The pros: Does a great job of mixing the ice cream and the toppings together, and makes even the most low-fat, sugar-free ice creams taste amazing. Unlike other reviewers- I found it incredibly easy to clean- I just pull out the pump and and the “grinder” from the base and put it in the top shelf of the dishwasher. No ice cream gets on the base or motor. I’ve been able to make a serving without assistance- pushing on a lever and pressing a button doesn’t require another person.The cons: the design of this machine is terrible. Half of your ice cream disappears- I’m not sure if the ice cream is super compressed in the machine or what, but if you put in a normal serving of ice cream, you will only get 25% of it out, even after scraping down the parts. The way the machine works is that a pump pushes the ice cream down to a spinning grinder, which blends the ice cream with the toppings. Most of the ice cream winds up stuck to the grinder part, as there is no machanism that scrapes it and pushes it out. After you are done extracting the ice cream from the machine, you have to pull the grinder off and scrape it down to get most of your dessert. By that time it’s more the texture of a “Blizzard” than soft serve. Because the grinder piece is so weirdly designed, there’s no way to get all the ice cream off it it, even with a tiny spatula. It’s a waste of food.If you are okay with wasting a lot of ice cream, and don’t mind manually scraping the grinder once you are done, then go ahead and buy this.The results *are* delicious, despite the work involved with actually getting them in a dish! I just don’t understand why an engineer at Black and Decker couldn’t come up with a machine that blends ice cream and then uses a pump to extract it all from the machine.