Jet Black Ice Cream Is the New Anti-Rainbow Food Trend

Ingredients:

— coconut (or other white) ice cream

— red and blue gel food coloring

Instructions:

1. Scoop ice cream into a bowl.

2. Add food coloring and mix well.

For all three treats, you will need red, white and blue ice cream. There are red and blue flavors on the market, but we couldn't find any, so we used dye. Feel free to buy or dye.

You gotta be quick with the licks to keep this from melting on your hand. We didn’t go with classic Neapolitan flavors (strawberry, vanilla, chocolate), but you could easily do so by dyeing the strawberry a deeper red and using white chocolate for the blue. Our version is solid coconut, but follow your heart!

Red, White and Blue Neapolitan

Take note of the round container we used for this. It was a fail! We highly recommend you use a bread tin instead. To make your ice cream, scoop the more solid white ice cream into a strip down the middle of the tin. This will act as a barrier for the other two, which will be in a more soup-like form due to mixing in the food coloring. Add red to one side and blue to the other. Place it in the freezer for around two hours.

Here's where the fail happened. When we tried to scoop the ice cream, because it was in a round tin, the act of pulling the scoop towards me spun ALL of the ice cream around in a circle. Whoops! I managed to get some in the end, but it wasn't ideal.

The proper way to eat ice cream is two scoops on a cone.

Ice cream: a true American patriot.

It took us five stores to find dragon fruit and when we sliced it open, it was a vibrant magenta rather than the white we expected. Sweet surprise in our book and a perfect topping for a layered milkshake.

Fourth of July Layered Milkshake

Mix and pour, mix and pour, mix and pour. If you want a thinner shake, add a bit of milk to your ice cream before you pour it in the glass.

Top with dragon fruit and pocky or any other fruit/candy combo you love.

We couldn't stop staring at these. They're so pretty!

This one is a callback to childhood. When we were kids, we loved mixing my ice cream until it was liquid and then pretending it was soup. What is with that? Why would we want to turn DESSERT into something that would normally be dinner or a side?

Ice Cream “Soup"

All you need to do for this award-winning “recipe” is mix your ice cream until it is the perfect consistency. Then add toppings. This is a dessert soup, after all, so toppings can consist of candy, sprinkles and fruit.

Meet your match, smoothie bowl.

Other ideas for toppings include blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, mochi, chia seeds and white chocolate. Don’t be afraid to add all different shades of red, white and blue. Your toppings don’t all need to be bold primary colors.

We hope we've inspired you to get creative with your ice cream this year! Happy Fourth of July!

Lucky for her, we discovered Ollie x Van Leeuwen Ice Cream’s nondairy ice cream for dogs. You can shop it at Van Leeuwen scoop shops across the country, as well as at most Petco locations and online. Ollie subscribers can add it to their orders, or join Ollie by June 13 for a free pint with purchase!

Puppy Love

Lucy's POV: First off, the smell! The scent of peanut butter, my fave, caused my tail to start wagging furiously. Then came the taste. The non-dairy ice cream is sweet and salty, with swirls of delicious peanut butter. One word: Drool! No belly aches here. Every lick = pure bliss. Paws-up from me!

But seriously, she LOVED it. She followed me back to the freezer hoping to catch another lick. She even rang her "bells" to go outside again, hoping there'd still be more there, lol

I’ve never seen her so excited for a treat – and she LOVES treats. I'm smitten with the idea of serving it for her birthday! BTW, yes, I also took a taste and it was really tasty and not super sweet! Exactly as Lucy describes.;)

Talking to Vanity Fair for her newest film Lee, Kate Winslet revealed one project she wishes fans asked about more is Iris. The 2001 film stars Kate as a young Iris Murdoch against Judi Dench's older counterpart. And for Kate, nothing was more terrifying than working with such a wonderful actress.

"People don’t really ask me about Iris. It’s such a delicate film," she says. "It was the first thing I had done after having my daughter. Going to work with a baby, I’m playing Iris Murdoch, looking to Judi Dench’s older Iris Murdoch — I was sh—ting myself."

Considering how nervous I get when I meet my heroes, I can only imagine what it was like to meet Dame Judi Dench. Talk about a dream! Another film Kate loves is Revolutionary Road, and not just because she got to reunite with Leonardo DiCaprio.

"The thing that people say is, 'You got to work with Leo again.' Then they go off on the whole Leo tangent, which I totally understand," she says of the film, which follows an ambitious couple who find themselves trapped in the reality of 1950s suburbia. "But Revolutionary Road — f—king hell, it just knocked us all sideways. Unbelievably difficult material. I was very proud of that film and what Leo and I were able to create as Frank and April. It was so brutal."

The process for getting Lee into the world sounds equally brutal, considering Kate started working on it over a decade ago. As producer, Kate tells Vanity Fair she doesn't mind the fact she's done more for the film than if she only had an acting credit. "That has felt very necessary for this film. But it’s also just really important to me," she says. "It’s important to me that people know that it’s out there and might feel compelled to go and see it."

Because it turns out, commercial success or stardom on its own doesn't actually help your movie get made! "It doesn’t matter who you are," she says. "No one’s going to go, 'Oh, I’ll just back that pony because she was in Titanic.' It doesn’t happen that way, and I never expected that. That’s really important to say."

"I've gotten older and I’ve learned more and felt more confident in myself about whether or not I could actually do it," she adds. "It’s not something I would’ve done had I not felt so passionately about the subject, and Lee was just—she wouldn’t let me go."