Oh, what a complicated name I gave that simple little recipe! With only 4 ingredients, you can effortlessly create the most scrumptious frozen treat. Could it be the biggest hit of this summer?
In this supreme treat, rich cream cheese and heavy cream get the ultimate companion from sugar-free white chocolate. Beautiful, vibrant swirls of sugar-free strawberry jam give a fresh taste to compensate all that rich creaminess. That’s it; you need nothing else!
Tips for making the White Chocolate Strawberry Swirl Cheesecake No-Churn Ice Cream or Popsicles
This treat couldn’t be easier to make! However, it’s good to remember a couple of things. If you use commercial sugar-free strawberry jam, always go for the options lowest in carbs and with the most natural sweeteners. There are “sugar-free” jams on the market that are very high in carbs, due to fruit juices they use for sweetening. There are also sugar-free jams and other interesting stuff sweetened with artificial sweeteners and filled with dubious ingredients. Those I cannot recommend either (plus the taste is super weird…)
If you can, get sugar-free strawberry jam sweetened with erythritol and stevia — or better to make some yourself with this easy recipe. If you are trying to get rid of utterly sweet flavors, unsweetened jam works well, too. You can also make that yourself; just leave out all sweeteners. Strawberries are naturally sweet.
If the jam is too stiff, you have two options to make it runnier: stir it vigorously with a spoon, or add a tablespoon or two of water (helps also reduce the overall carb count!)
For the sugar-free white chocolate, again, go for the real low-carb options. My favorite is KZ Clean Eating White Chocolate Bar, but unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t sell it during summer months. So unfair! The KZ Clean Eating White Chocolate is sweetened with xylitol and it shouts SWEET. However, you can buy the white chocolate on the KZ Clean Eating website (I think also on summertime if I’m not mistaken). And if you do, please remember to use code LOWCARBSOSIMPLE to get 15% off!
In my forthcoming cookbook, I will have a recipe for a perfect sugar-free dairy-free white chocolate, so when the book is out, you can make that chocolate anytime and use it also for this ice cream. UPDATE: the book is now published, you can find more about it here or just order it from Amazon.
For the cream cheese, go for as fatty version as you can, it gives the richest flavor. Also, be sure that there are no food additives and thickeners. I tried one version with good old Philly, and it made the ice cream somehow slightly slimy!
And, since this recipe calls for strawberry jam and white chocolate, I didn’t find it necessary to use additional sweetener, as those two ingredients give more than enough sweetness.
But let’s take a look how to make this inviting indulgence:
Take all the ingredients: cream cheese, heavy cream, sugar-free strawberry jam and sugar-free white chocolate.
Pour the heavy cream into a saucepan.
Add the chopped white chocolate.
Place on the stove top and heat over medium low heat, mixing all the time…
…until the white chocolate is melted. Let cool and then refrigerate until cold.
Once cold, beat the cream and white chocolate mixture (ganache) until fluffy.
Add the cream cheese…
…and beat again until fluffy.
Add the strawberry jam and make carefully a couple of swirls.
Pour the mixture into a freezer-safe box.
Freeze until solid. Take to room temperature 15-20 minutes before serving.
My experiments with this treat
Sorry, I was too lazy to write the lengthy recipe title above. Yes, it’s pretty lengthy. But at least, you know what it is about! Well, when I developed the recipe, I certainly didn’t know what the result would be. I just had the wild idea of white chocolate ice cream. Okay, now I have to confess. I had a perfect idea of Rose and White Chocolate Ice Cream for Mother’s Day, and I also made one experiment. However, instead of sugar-free white chocolate, I used sort of homemade white chocolate, including cocoa butter, heavy cream, powdered erythritol, rose water, and seeds from one vanilla bean.
First, I melted the cocoa butter with the heavy cream and sweetener and then let the mixture cool to room temperature, aiming at thick, rich ganache that I wanted to whip into a fluffy mousse. Sounds scrumptious, right? But the thing is, the cocoa butter solidified into ugly, tiny chunks that were certainly one of the most unappetizing things I’ve ever tasted. After whipping the ganache, I got that fluffy mousse, but it was full of ugly, tiny pieces of flavorless cocoa butter! Yum – not!
So, Mother’s Day passed without Rose and White Chocolate Ice Cream. Anyway, on that Mother’s Day weekend, I was in another town studying pathology, so we really didn’t celebrate… However, my husband’s birthday was on the following day, and I created a cake that turned out a masterpiece! (My long-time dream has been to create a blog for these kinds of masterpieces. If I ever do, you’ll surely find that creation there.)
But back to developing this recipe. Well, I don’t actually remember how and why I was thinking of cream cheese with white chocolate ice cream. I had made a low-carb cheesecake (again in my coming cookbook!) and most probably was just in the mood for cheesecake everything, so cheesecake ice cream was a perfect option. White chocolate cheesecake ice cream definitely needed something fresh to compensate, otherwise, it would have been too rich and sweet. Suddenly, I saw beautiful swirls of strawberry jam with ice cream in my eyes. Yum! That sounded perfect.
Luckily, I had created a recipe for homemade sugar-free strawberry jam some years ago. That would be just the right option. Well, to confess, I’m often too lazy to cook and just order commercial sugar-free strawberry jam from Germany. It’s sweetened with sorbitol, and it has some fructose, too, but it’s pretty low in carbs. Now, I again had ordered some and got the delivery right before I was developing the first version of this recipe. So, I used that commercial German sugar-free jam in my first experiment.
I was wondering about the rest of the ingredients. Jam and white chocolate should give enough sweetness, so there most likely would be no need to add any additional sweetener. Some of my ice cream recipes (like this and this) use raw eggs to help make the mixture fluffy and to work as kind of a bulk ingredient, but this time, I wanted to avoid raw eggs, since not everybody wants to use them. (Well, I do have ice cream recipes without egg as well, like this one and this one.) Anyway, if I melt the white chocolate with heavy cream and beat the mixture until fluffy, then add the cream cheese and again beat until fluffy, that should give a fluffy result with enough volume.
So, for my first experiment, I used 1/2 cup (120 ml) heavy cream, 3 oz. (85 g) white chocolate, 8 oz. (230 g) cream cheese, and 1/2 cup (120 ml) strawberry jam. And, as I always want to make things easy (yes, you know, I’m busy and impatient…), I wondered why the heck I should churn the ice cream in an ice cream maker and have a mess to clean afterwards. I simply would pour the thick mixture into a freezer-proof box, close the lid, and freeze until solid. How simple!
To my surprise, that first experiment worked really well. I took the ice cream from the freezer 30 minutes before I was planning to serve it. During that 30 minutes, it melted slightly, but not too much. The consistency was perfect, not too runny but not rock-hard either.
At some point, I thought this recipe would work as popsicles, and when I had gotten these cute umbrella popsicle molds as a birthday present last year, I couldn’t help but prepare a batch of White Chocolate Strawberry Swirl Cheesecake Popsicles. So, so adorable and delicious!
For the final recipe, I wanted to use the whole bar of KZ Clean Eating white chocolate that was 3.5 oz. (100 g), so I adjusted the amounts of other ingredients accordingly.
And here is the final recipe, enjoy!
- 2/3 cup = 160 ml heavy cream
- 3.5 oz = 100 g chopped sugar-free white chocolate (Get 15% off with code LOWCARBSOSIMPLE)
- 10 oz = 280 g full-fat cream cheese
- 1/2 cup = 120 ml homemade or commercial sugar-free strawberry jam
- Combine the heavy cream and the white chocolate in a saucepan.
- Heat over medium low heat, constantly stirring until the white chocolate is completely melted. Don't let boil.
- Let cool down to room temperature, then transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate until cold, about 2-3 hours.
- Place the cold cream and white chocolate mixture into a medium bowl. Beat with an electric mixer until fluffy.
- Add the cream cheese and beat again until fluffy.
- Add the strawberry jam and carefully make a couple of large swirls with a fork.
- Pour the mixture into a freezer-safe box with a tight-fitting lid.
- Freeze for 6 hours, or until solid.
- Take to room temperature 15-30 minutes before serving.
| Nutrition information | Protein | Fat | Net carbs | kcal |
| In total: | 28.4 g | 163.5 g | 35.2 g | 1813 kcal |
| Per serving if 4 servings in total: | 7.1 g | 40.9 g | 8.8 g | 453 kcal |
| Per serving if 6 servings in total: | 4.7 g | 27.3 g | 5.9 g | 302 kcal |
Tips for variation
Instead of strawberry jam, you can naturally use other flavors of sugar-free jam, homemade or commercial. Raspberry jam or blueberry jam are really good. When browsing Amazon, I found an interesting mix, with which you can make fresh, no-cook sugar-free jam. Well, it contains corn starch (I’m not a huge fan of starch; starch is just another sugar, a plant’s way to store sugar, so to say…), but if you stand that small amount, that mix might be worth trying when preparing homemade sugar-free jam.
You can also add chopped nuts or almonds to give a delicious crunch. What would be really nice in this ice cream is grated sugar-free white chocolate mixed in the ice cream before putting it in the freezer. You can also sprinkle the grated white chocolate on top. Crumbled freeze-fried strawberry would also look adorable on top — and give a nice crunch.
I bet this ice cream would work wonderfully made with sugar-free milk chocolate or dark chocolate. Since dark chocolate is pretty strong, I think I would use just 2 oz (60 g) dark chocolate — not the whole bar — unless you prefer really strong chocolate flavor. In my opinion, raspberry jam would work better with dark chocolate than strawberry jam. I think I will make some experiments and post that dark chocolate raspberry version as well!
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