Many negatives, but it does the job (sometimes)

First, maybe I'll touch on the drawbacks of most, if not all home ice cream makers. Many reviewers are not already aware of these and therefore, pan individual ice cream makers that are actually fine FOR WHAT THEY ARE: home (not professional) ice cream makers.

#1: Home ice cream makers don't make HARD ice cream. In fact, even on the cooking show Iron Chef, the host makes a point of demonstrating that their professional machine doesn't make hard ice cream. Their job is to whip air into the cream... the next step is always transferring the whipped frozen cream to the freezer for hardening.

#2: Ice cream preparation is time consuming. If you want the best tasting product, you must start with a French-style base which is really a cooked (then cooled) custard. This adds at least a few hours to the process, but it's not the machine's fault! :-) Quickie ice cream doesn't have the same depth & richness.

#3: Countertop models are noisy. Gears going round and round and all that. I assume more expensive models perhaps have better-quality parts that compensate for this and make less noise.

#4: You can't make "spontaneous" ice cream. There is at least one model out there that doesn't need to be pre-frozen, but most home ice cream makers rely on a liquid-filled canister that must be stored in the refrigerator at least several hours before you want ice cream. So you have to plan ahead; what a pain.

That said... this is a decent electric ice cream maker, with all the above limitations and one more: it shuts off automatically after 40 minutes. So if your ice cream isn't done by then - as a previous reviewer has pointed out - it's never going to be done. You can't reset the ice cream maker, so you basically just get to stare at your goopy mess and CRY...

Which you do, when your ice cream doesn't turn out, because usually there are kids (or eager grown-ups) waiting for ice cream, and you have to tell them all that there's no dessert. :-(

I actually bought this a year ago as a present for my daughter, who was turning 8. She's interested in food, and I thought this would be a fun thing we could do together. I can't stand those "kiddie" food things, like the Easy-bake type oven or the flimsy plastic ice cream toys, so I chose this Rival model instead.

She was initially excited, then found out about the waiting time for the canister... anyway, we eventually did use it, and made pretty good ice cream. And then it sat for a year (literally). We have a pretty small top-of-fridge freezer, so there's not usually anywhere to store the canister.

This past winter, I thought it might be smart to store the canister outside on our balcony (wrapped up, per the instructions). That way, it would always be frozen and ready to go! Well, duh... turns out nobody feels like eating ice cream in the wintertime! So the thing STILL went totally unused!

Well, this past weekend, in the middle of an early-June heatwave, I decided it was Ice Cream Time. Sunday morning, I stuck the canister in to freeze and made the custard, involving my daughter in the flavour-planning stage (she chose coconut marshmallow). Sunday afternoon, with temperatures in the 30's (Celsius; 80-90 fahrenheit), I dumped the custard in the canister and let 'er rip.

Well, I guess the heat was just too much for this lightweight machine, because 30-40 minutes later, it was still chugging away, and the custard was as liquid as ever.

I tried re-freezing the canister solid for a couple of hours and starting over with the custard mixture (storing it in the fridge in the meantime), but again, it was a no go. I ended up stirring the custard by hand until it froze into a gloppy kind-of unfluffy ice cream. No tears from the kids, but lots of disappointment.

Anyway, today the heatwave broke, and I planned ahead by freezing the canister extra-long (overnight). Made up a batch of Ben & Jerry's Sweet Cream in 30 minutes flat (40 if you count prep time), and I plan to surprise the kids when they get home. Not too shabby. But now you & I both know it can't really take extremely hot weather.

So would I buy it again? Maybe for me. I like being able to turn it on and walk away and come back to ice cream. I used to have a Donvier hand-cranked, and this is better, in terms of canister size and ease of use. But not as a gift for a child. There's too little hands-on, too much waiting time, and - most importantly - too great a chance of disappointment.

If you're planning on serving ice cream to guests, you should always make it ahead anyway to give it time to harden (see above). So it shouldn't be too catastropic if it fails to set; you should still have enough time to whip up something simple in the meantime. HOWEVER, with kids' short attention spans, you need a kitchen "craft" that is 100% surefire. Ice cream making, at least with this Rival machine, is not that activity.