This Ninja Creami alternative makes delicious ice cream for a cheaper price

Love ice cream? Well, chances are you’ve probably heard of the Ninja Creami. Launched in 2021, the Ninja Creami quickly went viral on everyone’s favourite social media app, TikTok, and it has fast become one of the best ice cream makers you can buy today.

When it comes to making homemade ice cream, the process can be a little time-consuming albeit rewarding. In general, you need to make your ice cream mixture 24 hours before you want to eat it so it can properly freeze before your ice cream maker churns it up.

But one of the many benefits of the Ninja Creami, as I found in my Ninja Creami review, is that it takes only a few minutes to whizz up your favourite ice cream or sorbet, compared to other machines that take a few hours. This is just one of the many reasons why the Ninja Creami became a viral sensation, and why Ninja launched its new Deluxe version which offers 10 options, including new frappe, slushy, frozen yoghurt and frozen drinks.

While Ninja is an affordable appliance brand, the Ninja Creami is one of the more expensive products in its portfolio, retailing at £199.99 (as of writing, it’s discounted to £179.99 on the Ninja website). This might not be a huge expense if you’re a big ice cream fan, but others might not want to spend that type of money on something they’ll only use during the hotter months of the year.

But I recently found a Ninja Creami alternative that might be better…and cheaper. Enter the Cuisinart Iced Dessert Maker. US kitchen and cookware brand, Cuisinart design and manufacture popular kitchen appliances, including kettles, toasters, blenders, coffee machines and sandwich makers, and the Cuisinart Iced Dessert Maker is one of four ice cream makers from the brand. 

Compared to the Ninja Creami, the Cuisinart Iced Dessert Maker has a more petite size, making it much easier to store. As part of Cuisinart’s Style collection, the Cuisinart Iced Dessert Maker has a subtle silver and green pastel colour that looks good when in action or on display.

The main benefit of the Ninja Creami is its many different functions, and while the Cuisinart Iced Dessert Maker might not have as many, it’s perfect for making ice cream, sorbet, frozen yoghurt and fruit blends. In terms of speed, the Cuisinart Iced Dessert Maker requires you to pre-freeze the bowl overnight (like the Ninja Creami) before it’ll whip up your dessert in as little as 25 minutes.

An impressive feature of the Cuisinart Iced Dessert Maker is its frozen fruit paddle which easily blends soft ingredients as it freezes, so you can have chunky or smooth fruit-based desserts. While the Cuisinart Iced Dessert Maker might not be beating the Ninja Creami in speed, it does in price as it costs £140 compared to Ninja’s £199.99.

Personally, I can’t really fault the Ninja Creami and I’m looking forward to using it this summer, but if you don’t eat tons of ice cream throughout the year, you might be looking for an alternative, and the Cuisinart Iced Dessert Maker is the one I’d recommend.