Black & Decker IC200 Arctic Twister Ice Cream Mixer,White

I love it! It does leave some ice cream in the machine...but I can just spoon that into my bowl. I love soft serve ice cream & am so happy I can now make it at home

We love this, use it all the time, it does waste some ice cream because it stays in the tube, but easy to get out, and easy to clean

Pro's: 1.This product does make soft icecream and you can use all the delicious ingredients you want. 2. I find clean up relatively easy by just running the parts under hot running water right after using. Con's: 1. Takes a LOT of icecream to make a small serving. 2. The first time you fill it---it basically just coats the crusher bar with icecream. Which doesn't come off without scraping it off by hand after you're done making soft servings. 3. You have to hold down the power button for some stupid reason rather than just turning it on and off. 4. You have to pump the lever on the machine with the other hand to get the icecream to decend. 5. If you're going to make cones you need a 3rd hand to hold the cone and rotate it as the icecream dispenses. Would I buy this model again paying [what I did] No, I would wait till it evolves into a better performing automatic machine.

No stars for this! The only way this product would get a star from me would be a big punch in the eye to the people at Black and Decker. I purchased this product as a Christmas gift for the family. Today is the first try for nice smooth ice cream and the machine broke before the first chocolate chip hit the ice cream. Today is Dec. the 26th. So now I have to go to the trouble of sending it back. What a piece of junk. Hope you all have better luck with it than I.

My sister loves it. It is easy to use and easy to clean.

The IC200 ice cream mixer is a one-trick pony. The only thing it's supposed to do is take hard ice cream and convert it into soft-serve, and this is does quite well. Setup is a snap, quite literally: just use the enclosed instructions to snap the pieces together. Although one of the pieces is pictured as a mirror image of itself, it's easy enough to figure out how it all goes together. Total assembly time: under five minutes, and that's only the first time. Once you've got the hang of it, thirty seconds is probably about right. Once you've got the mixer together, you just scoop your hard ice cream and any toppings into the top and flip the switch. The mixer starts turning while the user manually pumps the ice cream into the twister, just like a professional soft-serve machine. Within a minute or so, your soft-serve is dispensed, complete with any toppings you've mixed in. Make sure you use a bowl or a flat-bottomed cone, unless each person is going to hold his or her own cone; having both hands available makes it much easier to use. Now for the one real caveat: once all the ice cream has been pumped into the twister, there's still plenty left in there. Unless you disassemble the mixer immediately and scoop out the extra ice cream, you're going to lose about a cone's worth. Granted, this ice cream will be as soft as the rest, but it's not nearly as pretty and is sort of difficult to remove. Bottom line: if you're looking for good soft-serve ice cream (in any flavor you can find!), look no further. Just watch out for the overage in the twister, and you'll be good.

It was cheep, so I can't complain, but it's for kids, soft Ice cream, and while it's fun, it doesn't do a great job, is hard to clean, and the switch inside, to turn it on, needs to be re-wired so it stays on without the button, so you don't need three hands to operate it. I removed the spring in the switch so it is a toggle switch and it works much better.

This machine does make store-bought ice cream into soft-serve ice cream which tastes great and has a wonderful texture! It also dispenses the ice cream like soft-serve in a restaurant which makes it easy to fill cones (without breaking them!) and to make cute coiled or stacked designs. Things to know: 1. Make sure to use only well-frozen hard ice cream, and don't waste any time once it is put into the tube. It is best if you can replace the store-bought ice cream container back into the freezer in between cones. Keeping the ice cream frozen as firm as possible is key to getting a great outcome with this machine. 2. The lever handle/top fits only ONE way correctly onto the tube with the notches. 3. There will be some wasted ice cream in the spiralizer after making each cone. You can just leave it and let that amount go into the next cone, or rinse it out and waste that amount between cones. At the end of use, you can dump that amount into a bowl to eat or rinse it away. So it might be best to use cheap ice cream if the cost of that waste bothers you. 4. The until I have is different than one I watched being used on YouTube in that the power switch stays on ONLY while it is being held down, but the one in the video stayed on with a touch and didn't shut off until pressed again. The way my unit is, it requires 3 hands to use: one to hold the power button on, one to pull down the lever, and another to hold and fill the cone, etc. 5. The tube needs to be packed full of ice cream to have enough to make a full cone. 6. The unit will drip ice cream pretty quickly after making a cone from the ice cream that is left in the spiralizer melting, so make sure to put down a rag or something to catch the mess. Some have suggesting putting this part in the freezer between uses so this part isn't wasted from melting. The machine is not hard to clean and could probably even just be rinsed with hot water. The parts that need cleaned do come apart easily. The unit is kind of bulky, so it will take up some storage space, but if you love soft-serve ice cream or especially, if you have children around, kids absolutely love this activity! If you have multiple kids wanting ice cream cones from McDonald's, this is a less expensive way to satisfy them all right at home. I would recommend this machine if you go into it understanding the points I have made.