Recreate Dairy Queen's Iconic Blizzard At Home With One Kitchen Appliance

There's no summer treat quite like a Dairy Queen Blizzard. The crème de la crème of the fast food chain's menu features soft serve blended up with your choice of toppings. While some of the chain's Blizzards are available year-round, others are monthly specials. So if you don't act quickly enough, you may not get your hands on a Peanut Butter Cookie Dough Party or Picnic Peach Cobbler Blizzard before it disappears from the menu.

That being said, you don't have to live near a DQ to get your hands on one of these seasonal, or even year-round, selections. In fact, you can make your own Blizzard at home with a stand mixer. The stand mixer is like the workhorse of the kitchen, and it's one appliance that is worth investing in for hacks like these.

The first thing you'll need to do to make your DIY Blizzard is to place your metal mixing bowl into the freezer for about 10 minutes. This will prevent your ice cream from turning into soup when you go to mix it. Once the bowl is adequately chilled, add in your ice cream. While hard ice cream, like the stuff sold in pints, won't have the same mouthfeel as a DQ Blizzard's soft serve base, it will offer a similar flavor. Plus, DIYing this dessert means you can swap out the two usual flavors, chocolate and vanilla, for other ones. Once you've affixed the paddle attachment, mix up your ice cream for a minute before adding your crushed add-ins and mixing again. 

The stand mixer is the best appliance that you can use for this recipe — for several reasons. For one, the mixer is designed to, well, mix, rather than crush your candy pieces. If you use a food processor instead, you may risk your mix-ins becoming pulverized rather than slowly incorporated into the ice cream. The same can be said about a blender, which would turn your Blizzard into a milkshake. And no matter how tasty that is, it's probably not what you're going for. That being said, the parts on the blender and the food processor can generate a ton of heat, which could prematurely melt your ice cream.

Once you learn the ropes of making this frozen treat in your stand mixer, you can start playing with different flavors and add-ins, including sauces, spreads, and crunchy bits. Regardless, we would always recommend using an ice cream that has a ton of air pumped into it, rather than a high-quality ice cream brand that is super dense. You want the soft, almost-fluffy mouthfeel of a classic Dairy Queen Blizzard, rather than a chunky, heavy mouthfeel of a DIY Ben & Jerry's creation.