French Vanilla Snow Cones (With Real Snow!)

I have the most fabulous winter-time treat to share with you today!  Recently we made French Vanilla Snow Cones using real snow! If you’ve never tried this classic Canadian treat, you simply must! Using real snow for snow cones sounds kind of crazy, I know, but I promise you, this stuff tastes better than any store-bought iced dessert out there.

Of course, using clean, freshly-fallen snow is a must, so you’ll want to do this during or soon after a snowfall.

You can make your snow cones out the yard, or you can do like we did and bring your snow indoors.

There are actually a few different ways to make these snowy treats, and I’ll talk about those in a minute. For starters though, I’ll tell you how we flavoured our snow cones to taste like French Vanilla. This version is rich, sweet and creamy, and made with three simple ingredients: snow, sweetened condensed milk and vanilla extract. 

To start, you’ll need anywhere from 8 to 12 cups of fresh, fluffy snow. The amount that you’ll actually depends on whether your snow is heavy and dense or light and fluffy. Start with 8 cups though, and simply add to it if you find you need more.
To gather our snow, I cleared off the top layer of a patch of snow in the yard, and filled a big basin with it.  You could just set a large bowl outside during a snowfall, and collect your snow that way if you’d rather.

Once inside, we scooped our snow from the bin into a mixing bowl.

Then we dribbled about a teaspoon of vanilla over the snow. 

The next step was to add the condensed milk. We poured that over the snow, and stirred and mashed it all into the snow.   

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We would stop and add more snow as needed, and we continued to mix and stir until we felt like we had the right consistency.

When it looked “just right”, we transferred it all into a freezer-safe container.  This would allow us to freeze any of the snow that we didn’t eat right away.

Then, we scooped our snow into cups, and topped our snow cones off with sprinkles.

Mmmmm! Icy and sweet French Vanilla snow cones! 

We can’t wait to make them again so we can experiment with different flavours.
We’d like to try flavouring our snow cones with maple syrup or chocolate syrup. Or we may add a splash of fruit juice and a handful of chopped fruit. Whatever we choose, one thing is for sure—the results will be delicious.