Annika's, scaled for a slush machine. She first wrote it down as The Slushi-Scaled Baja Rosa, so it is worth knowing both names. A frozen cream drink built on ice cream rather than ice, so it goes in on the Milkshake setting. Strawberry liqueur against vanilla — strawberries and cream, with tequila in it.
Ingredient amounts only. Times, temperatures and everything in the
steps and notes are unchanged — they do not scale.
Ingredients
6 cups FRENCH vanilla ice cream, softened significantly
(first make, 2026-08-30: Chapman's Premium French Vanilla, 2 L tub)
1.5 cups Baja Rosa (12 oz) — a creamy STRAWBERRY tequila liqueur
1 cup 2% milk (8 oz)
Toppers and rimmers — optional
Annika's, tried on the first make, and her verdict was "It's delicious!!". None of this is needed to make the drink; all of it is worth having.
Inca Fire Salt ON THE RIM — front-loads the salt and the heat onto the first sip, then it fades into the drink.
Inca Fire Salt DUSTED ON TOP — spreads it across the whole glass and builds as you drink down.
She did both at once. Inca Fire Salt is a chilli-lime salt; any salt carrying chilli and lime peel does the same job. It is a habanero salt, so go lightly — and put it on the GLASS, never stirred through the batch, because salt cannot be taken back out of 1750 mL.
Steps
Blend everything until it is a completely smooth, uniform liquid. A regular blender or an immersion blender both work — Annika used an immersion blender on the first make.
Pour the mixture into the slush hopper.
Set it to the "Milkshake" setting and let it churn.
Finish the poured glass from the toppers list below, if you want it.
Whatever you use, put it on the GLASS and never stir it through the batch, and go lightly. It is a habanero salt, cold and sweet both mask it at first, and the heat arrives late and climbs. Salt cannot be taken back out of 1750 mL. Try one glass before you commit the hopper.
Reviews
"🤤 The tits." — Jason
Notes
DAIRY IN A SLUSH HOPPER IS A CLEANING JOB, NOT A LEFTOVER. A hopper holds product just above freezing for hours, and this base is mostly ice cream and milk. Empty it and clean the machine the same day — do not leave a dairy base sitting in the hopper overnight and top it up tomorrow. This is the one part of this recipe that can actually make somebody ill.
DO NOT LET IT CHURN INDEFINITELY. This is a cream base being worked by an auger. Cream that is agitated long enough breaks — it goes grainy and then it goes to butter. Take it off when it is slush, not when you remember it.
Alcohol lowers the freezing point, which is why frozen drinks have a ceiling on how strong they can be before a machine simply will not set them. The label on the bottle reads 15% alc./vol., 750 mL. So 1.5 cups of Baja Rosa is about 355 mL carrying roughly 53 mL of pure alcohol, spread through about 1750 mL of finished drink — call it 3 percent by volume, which is beer strength and comfortably inside what a slush machine will freeze.
Worth saying plainly because it does not taste like it: this IS an alcoholic drink. It is built on ice cream, it is called a milkshake, and at that strength it goes down like one.
SHOPPING: a 750 mL bottle of Baja Rosa is about 3.2 cups, so one bottle is two batches with a little left over. A 2 L tub of ice cream is about 8.5 cups, so one tub covers a batch with roughly 2.5 cups spare.
FRENCH VANILLA IS NOT A SPELLING OF VANILLA, it is a different ice cream, and Annika specified it deliberately. It is a custard base — egg yolks in it — so it is richer and it is yellow rather than white. Against a pink strawberry liqueur that lands the finished drink nearer peach than pink. Plain vanilla would make a paler, lighter drink. Use French.
EQUIPMENT: a Ninja Slushi. Its minimum fill is 16 oz, about 475 mL. For the blending, either a regular blender or an immersion blender.
▶ The immersion blender is arguably the better tool for this and not just the more convenient one. Six cups of softened ice cream is a thick base, and a thick base in a countertop jug can cavitate — an air pocket forms around the blades and the machine spins while the middle of the mixture never moves. With a stick blender you go and find the unmixed part. You also blend in the vessel you are already using, which on a recipe this size is one less enormous thing to wash.
WHICH MEANS THIS RECIPE SCALES DOWN, AND EXACTLY HOW FAR. A full batch is about 1750 mL, roughly 3.7 times the minimum fill. So a THIRD batch — 2 cups ice cream, 1/2 cup Baja Rosa, 1/3 cup milk — comes to about 580 mL and still clears the line. A QUARTER batch is about 440 mL and does NOT: the machine will not run it. A third is as small as this goes.
YIELD: about 1750 mL. It clears the minimum fill line on the machine, which is the thing worth knowing before you commit six cups of ice cream to it.
NOTE THAT 8.5 CUPS OF INGREDIENTS DOES NOT MAKE 8.5 CUPS OF DRINK. On the first make it read close to two litres in the jug and then SETTLED to about 1750 as the ice cream gave up its air. Ice cream is sold with air whipped into it, so measuring it by the cup measures the air too — blend it and roughly an eighth of the volume walks off. The arithmetic said 2011 mL. The machine said 1750. The machine is right, and this is why a yield belongs on a page only after somebody has actually made the thing.