Review: Von Shef Frozen Dessert Maker

Domu is a brand, resulting form ten years experience with Designer Habitat.

Their goal is to give customers very competitively priced gadgets at a lower price than the traditional brand name items.    The products allow us to get a wide variety of home and kitchen products at a much lower cost than traditional brands.  I’ve had a look around the website several times and I’ve been pretty well impressed by the range on offer and the prices for what we get.

I received a frozen dessert maker to try from the range, and although I found it a bit tricky to navigate to begin with, I think we’ve found a good way to get on, especially considering the nice big bowl of what tastes and feels like ice-cream, but is actually only fruit.  That made me persevere after my first disastrous attempt at using it.

I did try the bananas and strawberries.  The book says to freeze the fruit for at least 12 hours beforehand.  I did, but you do need to chop up the strawberries into chunks if they’re medium to large sized, as my first try ended up with strawberries that were too large to push through with the plunger.

My attempts didn’t look as smooth or as perfect as the picture on the website, but I found that by mixing the fruity pulp that comes out of the machine afterwards, that it looks more like ice-cream than it did while it was pouring out.

I found the consistency very thick, but a few more minutes out of the freezer and I was able to mix the fruit into a nice consistency.  The blade part of the machine is very sharp, as it needs to be for crushing frozen fruit, and the machine itself is very noisy in action, but I was impressed with the dessert we had at the end of it all.

We can add frozen cream and other items to it, to make it a more creamy and luxurious dessert, but to be honest, I really liked the fruit on its own.  I’d say it takes a wee while to get used to, and the banana makes the dessert much more creamy if it’s fruit only.  On it’s own, the strawberry was much like a sorbet.  I’m planning to buy the frozen bags of fruit from supermarkets and trying those next.

Desserts with zero sugar and no added fat have a distinct advantage and it’s an easy way to get fruit into kids.

I actually really like the look of the Von Shef Expresso and Coffee Machine, and am off to send an e-mail to find out if it can use any coffee pod in it, because if it can, I’ll be ordering one for my kitchen.  I hadn’t heard of Domu before, but now I know about it, I’m quite pleased about the range of products and the prices.