Cuisinart Frost Fusion Ice Cream Maker ICE200U Review

Design and Features

• Tall and heavy, hard to store
• Cools liquids from outside in
• Not as high-tech as Ninja alternative

The Cuisinart Frost Fusion isn’t quite as wide as the competing Ninja Slushi, but it is still heavy at 14kg – and awkwardly tall at 45cm, so much so that it doesn’t actually fit in any cupboard in my kitchen for storage. 

This combination means it’s not exactly something you’ll want to be moving around often, so it’s probably best to be fully committed to the idea of a slushie maker – and having enough counter space – before investing. 

While most will simply see this as a Slushi competitor, there’s an important point of differentiation here: the Frost Fusion can make soft-serve ice cream alongside standard slushies, frozen cocktails, frappes, wine slushes and sorbets. If you go down the Ninja route, you’ll need two different machines to achieve the same.  

Each mode is easily selected via the touchscreen panel on the front, with icons for each available mode. There are also cold level controls, allowing you to fine-tune the temperature if you find your drink isn’t quite frozen enough, or too frozen, though this is only possible with certain modes. 

The soft serve ice-cream mode, for example, can’t be edited – and that’s a shame because I felt that the soft-serve delivered was a little too soft. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

There’s a hatch on the top of the unit where the liquids are added, with marks on the front of the machine denoting the minimum (500ml) and maximum (1300ml) levels. It’s easy enough to add certain liquids, like fresh fruit juice, but most slushes – and certainly the ice cream – require a mix of ingredients to properly ‘slush up’.

Handily, Cuisinart includes a few pages of recipes in the manual, ranging from classic vanilla soft-serve to fancy pink lemonade slushies to boozy options like frozen margaritas and fruity peach sorbets, along with instructions on how to properly mix your desired beverage. 

Essentially, it all comes down to the amount of sugar found in the liquid; most drinks simply don’t have enough sugar to halt the freezing process and create that slush texture you’re looking for. Drinks without enough sugar will freeze solid in the machine.  

That’s one of the biggest challenges of using the Frost Fusion, and an area where its biggest competitor excels; the Ninja Slushi will beep and flash to alert you to low sugar levels and the potential for your slush to completely freeze. There’s nothing of the sort here; it’ll just perform the task as usual and freeze the liquid solid. 

And, yes, unfortunately, I’m speaking from experience here. It’ll take a while to get used to the correct mixes, especially if you veer away from the Cuisinart-approved recipes in the manual, as I occasionally did. 

Once you have added the correct mixture of liquids, it’s a pretty simple process; simply select the mode you’d like to choose via the LED panel on the front, choose the cooling level (depending on the mode) and press the start button. The internal auger then mixes the liquid, while the metal container it’s held in quickly cools to chill and freeze the mix.  

This is a different approach to the Slushi, which has an evaporator in the auger to cool the mix from the inside out, allowing for a near-complete view of the internals of the slushie maker. That allows you to change the temperature on the fly if your drink is still watery and vice-versa, but with only a small plastic viewing hole at the front of the Frost Fusion, such previews are much more difficult.

In fact, there have been a handful of occasions where I thought the Fusion was empty, only to see slush/ice cream left at the back of the barrel upon opening it – and once you’ve taken the front off, you can’t enable the auto-chill feature that kicks in once your drink is done. 

The benefit to this design is that the Frost Fusion can cool slushies and ice cream much faster; Ninja requires between 30 minutes and an hour, while most varieties of slush and ice cream from the Frost Fusion are done in under 30 minutes, with only alcoholic beverages pushing things a little past the 30-minute mark. 

There’s very little fanfare from the Frost Fusion once your chilled drinks are ready, with a simple bleep and nothing more – and that meant I missed it on a couple of occasions, only noticing the silence left behind by the not-silent drone of the slush maker when in use. 

That said, dispensing is pretty simple; just grab the handle and pull it towards you. There’s a sensor embedded in the front of the machine that’s supposed to detect your hands approaching and spool up the auger to get the mix moving before you pull the handle, but I’ve found this to be very hit-and-miss. 

Instead, I found that placing my hand in front of the sensor to bring it to speed before dispensing delivered the most consistent pour. 

If you’re doing ice cream, however, you’ll first need to put the star tip in the dispenser – and with a snap-on design, it’s done very easily. This essentially gives your ice cream that typical star-finish from pro-level soft-serve dispensers, and makes it a little easier to control the flow into your bowl or cone. 

There’s no need to rush to dispense at once either; depending on the type of slush you’ve made, it can keep it cool for up to 16 hours – though soft-serve ice cream has a much shorter life at just one hour. That said, I’ve scooped the remaining soft serve into a tub, put it into the freezer and had it later, and it tastes just as nice. 

Once all your drinks have been dispensed or transferred to another container, clean-up is a doddle. Simply fill the vessel up with a mix of warm water and a touch of soap and let it run through the rinse cycle. 

I find that two runs of the rinse cycle are enough to get rid of pretty much all remnants, and the dispenser cover, auger and drip tray are all removable and able to be washed separately – but only by hand, not a dishwasher. 

Performance

• Ice cream and sorbet are very disappointing
• Much better at making slushes
• Can sometimes freeze at the back of the machine

While there are plenty of slush makers out there, there aren’t many that can also do soft-serve ice-cream – so that’s, of course, where I started. Cusinart’s manual includes a full vanilla soft serve ice-cream recipe that was pretty easy to prep with the usual suspects – whole milk, double cream, vanilla extract, sugar and salt – and I had high hopes when pouring the home-made mix into the machine.

Reader, I was very disappointed with what I got out of it. The soft serve dispensed was indeed soft, but too soft – like it was still in the process of thickening up. It was structurally okay initially, but it certainly isn’t anywhere as thick and full as what you’d get from the ice-cream man, and it melted very quickly.

I doubted whether I had done something wrong, so I binned the lot and tried again, re-checking my measurements. Sadly, it was exactly the same the second time around. I tried re-running the function (something I wasn’t told to do, but thought it might do the trick), but that just made it too thick to dispense. 

It was a similar story when trying to make a strawberry sorbet; I blended strawberries and the simple syrup outlined in the manual to ensure it was sugary enough, and left it going for around 25 minutes. The sorbet looked delicious when it was still in the machine, but upon dispensing, I was met with something with the consistency of ketchup. It wasn’t nice at all. 

Looking at the Cuisinart website, you can see plenty of user reviews that all state the same. This is, simply put, not a very good ice cream maker. 

Thankfully, things are more positive if you want a slushie on a hot day. I’ve had more success creating a range of slushies than I did making ice cream, with Coke, cider, strawberry, and even apple flavourings. They’re pretty quick to chill too; most only needed around 20-25 minutes, with only the alcoholic slushes needing a little longer at around 30-40 minutes. 

The default cool setting is ideal for most of these – though I did crank it up a bit with the cider flavouring, as I think the alcohol content meant it needed a little more of a chill. 

Don’t go too crazy though; I ramped the cooling level to max when trying to make a slush and it resulted in a large chunk of the mix getting stuck at the back of the machine, only accessible by taking the dispenser and auger out of the machine.

Should you buy it?