Chocolate Covered Ice Cream Bars

One of the main food sites I follow on a regular basis is Serious Eats. I was introduced by one of my co-workers not too long after starting my current job. It's a great general food site/blog. They do reviews, recipes, advice, etc. There are lots of sub-sections of the site and they recently started up a new one - Serious Eats Sweets. One of the new features is a weekly challenge of sorts. They determine the theme and readers can submit pictures of recipes they've made that fall within that theme. I'm going to try to keep up with the challenge for as long as I can, either submitting pictures of things I've already made or making new recipes to fall within the theme. The new slideshows are posted on the site every Thursday. Last week I was able to submit a picture of my rhubarb cupcakes as part of the Share Your Sweets Summer Desserts feature. 

The theme for this week is "Cool Off". I chose to make a recipe I'd seen on the site the week before - homemade chocolate covered ice cream bars. Mmm. Pretty simple...melt some chocolate with a bit of oil to keep it liquid, cut up a pint of ice cream, stick in some sticks, dip in chocolate and freeze. The recipe I used can be found here. I did make a slight modification. I only had a large bag of chocolate chips so I used 9 oz of chocolate and 5 tablespoons of canola oil for the chocolate dip.

Just like the ice cream sandwiches, start with the best

Cut off the bottom of the carton

Cookie dough and brownies

Slice the pint into 4 and add sticks. I had to use skewers

Dip in the cooled melted chocolate and decorate (if you want)

In theory, this is a super simple and tasty treat. However, I quickly learned that my freezer isn't cold enough to make the process as easy as it could be. No matter how long I left the slices in there, I couldn't get them to freeze really hard. I think the chocolate process would be a lot easier with solidly frozen ice cream. I also couldn't find food grade popsicle sticks so I tried to make due with two skewers. That didn't work out so well either. The skewers seemed to cut the slices in half. The one ice cream bar pictured is the only one that turned out remotely photo worthy. Although they weren't pretty, they sure are tasty! I would try them again. The combinations you could make are endless. 


What is your favorite ice cream treat on a hot summer day?