Chocolate-Coated Ice Cream Bars

For Christmas, I received the book Chocolate Recipes and Techniques from the Ferrandi School of Culinary Arts and as part of my chocolate study, I read many of the recipes. While I gained inspiration from in terms of flavour and texture combinations (and will surely return to them in the future), what stood out was the section on frozen desserts. Maybe it's because I'm dreaming of summer, maybe it's because it was different from the other books I've read. Either way, I decided my next foray would be chocolate-coated ice cream bars. 

Now, last week, I blogged about making strawberry ice cream with chocolate fudge brownie pieces. For several years, I've been making a quart of ice cream to enjoy during the summer. Knowing I wanted to try making ice cream bars, I had already ordered a mold from an online retailer. I put the mold to good use, filling four of the eight wells with ice cream before transferring the rest of the mixture into reusable ice cream tubs. (I cut the mold in half to make it easier to work with.) I let these set in the freezer until I had time to coat them in chocolate. On Wednesday evening, despite a long day at work with too many hours on my feet, I decided to carpe the ol' diem and get this done.

Since I had only four ice cream bars and the recipe said it would coat ten, I made half the recipe. It couldn't be simpler. Melt dark chocolate to 40 degrees and then add grapeseed oil. Stir well and dip.

I dipped the first two bars, but found it tricky to get them fully coated because of the vessel I was using to hold the chocolate. For the second two bars, I spooned the chocolate over the ice cream bars. Both methods worked fine provided I took a one-and-done approach. If I tried to re-dip or fill in missed spots, I ended up with a rippled coating. If I were to do this again, I'd make double the required coating, giving myself more to work with.

Once the bars were enrobed, I popped them back into the freezer for 20 minutes to fully solidify. And then I packaged them individually, to be enjoyed on a hot summer day. (Or on a Friday treat day...)

What can I say? They look good. They taste great. 

The viscosity of the chocolate was such that it produced the perfect chocolate shell -- not too thick, not too thin, and perfectly capable of containing ice cream as it begins to soften and melt. And the addition of the grapeseed oil made it easy to bite through the shell, directly out of the freezer. Top marks to the Ferrandi School of Culinary Arts.

Look out, Haagan Dazs, I'm coming for you!