Pumpkin Ice Cream

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Smooth and creamy homemade ice cream made with real pumpkin, sweetened with brown sugar, and spiced with cinnamon and pumpkin pie spice. Get your pumpkin ice cream fix any time of the year with this simple recipe!

While it can seem a bit silly to create a fall ice cream flavor since we’ve typically moved on to baking with warm spices and flavors by now, I am totally an “ice cream all year” kind of person, and maybe you are, too.

If you’re not into ice cream all year like I am, perhaps you’re wondering who the heck might want a pumpkin ice cream recipe.

But I know there are some (or maybe many) of you nodding your head right now and are dying to get some homemade pumpkin ice cream into your ice cream maker ASAP. You folks… You are my people.

Welcome to your new favorite fall ice cream flavor (though I urge you to try my praline ice cream because those brown sugared pralines scattered around swirls of salted caramel sauce in vanilla ice cream are a lovelyyyy way to welcome fall, too!).

We have to tread lightly with pumpkin purée, because as we know from creating with pumpkin in the past (like, a million times), adding fresh pumpkin to a recipe brings extra moisture which can lead to extra soggy/cakey baked goods.

Though we obviously aren’t baking this ice cream, we’ll only need 1 cup of pumpkin purée to bring just the right amount of pumpkin flavor without so we can prevent overloading the ice cream base with too much liquid.

I typically go for white sugar when I make my homemade ice creams, but since pumpkin calls for a deeper molasses pairing, we’re using brown sugar in its place for this pumpkin spice ice cream recipe.

The ice cream maker takes care of the rest. All you have to do is stand there and watch it do its thing. Talk about a truly easy pumpkin ice cream recipe, am I right?

No but really, the best way to tell when homemade ice cream made in an ice cream maker is finished is to look for the consistency of soft serve ice cream.

I often see this consistency show up when my ice cream maker starts spilling out of the top, since there’s so much air incorporated into the mixture and it’s much larger than it was when it was just liquid.

The rest of the magic happens in the freezer, and you’ll want to freeze your homemade pumpkin ice cream for at least 2 hours, but I encourage you do leave it for more like 8 hours or overnight.

You can really taste the true pumpkin complemented only by cinnamon and pumpkin pie spice, and it is perfectly sweetened by the brown sugar with a hint of that deep molasses flavor profile you can only find in brown sugar.

And I am telling you, once you start rolling with the toppings that go with fall, you’re going to want to keep making batches and batches of this stuff.

And when you do… Invite me over for a bowl, would ya?