DIY Magic Shell and more

July 5, 2014 3:34 PM

If hot weather has you in the mood for an ice cream treat, Serious Eats has you covered* with a recipe for DIY Magic Shell and five suggestions for how to use it, including faux Klondike Bars, dipped soft-serve cones, ice cream pops, and something they call a King Cone but which looks a lot more like a Sundae Cone or Drumstick to me.

*depending on how much of a messy eater you are     
posted by Lexica (16 comments total)

Mmmm, faux-It's it sounds really good to me right now. Need a recipe for an ultra-soft oatmeal cookie.
posted by muddgirl at 3:50 PM on July 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Incidentally, as a West Coaster, I have to say "'Mr. Softee'? Huh? DQ and Foster's Freeze all the way!" My first non-family-related job was working for Dairy Queen after junior year of high school. When confronted with a soft-serve machine, at buffet lines or elsewhere, I can still do a fairly credible "DQ curl", despite the intervening decades. Muscle memory FTW!
posted by Lexica at 4:12 PM on July 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

I've made Magic Shell with chocolate and coconut oil and it's pretty fun - the corn syrup is completely optional, and the recipe isn't nearly as finicky as the Serious Eats post implies (but they're Serious Eats and it's their duty to be serious). It'd probably be pretty super great on frozen bananas.
posted by Metroid Baby at 4:20 PM on July 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

This makes so much sense, now that I've done all kinds of other cooking with coconut oil. I was always fascinated and a bit weirded out that the store-bought Magic Shell we had when I was a kid, if left around for a few years, would separate into a chocolate sludge with a mysterious clear liquid on top. Glad to know that the clear stuff (probably) wasn't a kind of plastic or petroleum distillate or something along those lines.
posted by XMLicious at 4:36 PM on July 5, 2014

This seems to be written by someone who has not had a Klondike for quite a while:

There's a reason Klondike Bars are so well loved—the ice cream and chocolate that go into them are pretty quality stuff, at least by ice cream truck standards.

I have; and neither the ice cream nor the chocolate seemed that good to me. Also, either they've shrunk or I've got bigger.

Their Haagen-Daaz-ified version looks pretty great though.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 4:41 PM on July 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Double
posted by ardgedee at 4:53 PM on July 5, 2014

When I was a kid and would go with my parents to visit my paternal grandparents in another part of town, we'd stop occasionally along the way at a little stand where you could get your your soft-serve vanilla cone dipped in chocolate-flavored Magic Shell (or the generic equivalent), and I thought it was the best thing EVAR!!1!.

The place in question actually is not that far from where I live these days, but it's now a produce market, so I think I'll be visiting the ice cream aisle on my next trip to the grocery store...
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 4:55 PM on July 5, 2014

I've been meaning to try this It's It recipe for a while. Now I'll make sure to replace the melted chocolate with home made Magic Shell.
posted by GeckoDundee at 5:24 PM on July 5, 2014

It's not just you, WHADK, I've been out of the States for about 4 years and was back visiting earlier in the year. I bought a pack of Klondike bars and the bars were definitely smaller and the quality of the ice cream was noticeably worse.

Thanks, Unilever!
posted by C^3 at 7:41 PM on July 5, 2014

Today's Klondikes are a pale, pale imitation of their forebears.

. for Isaly's
posted by bakerina at 9:30 PM on July 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

A few years ago Klondike switched from a real milk chocolate shell to a "chocolatey"* coating.

*i hate it when I see that weasel-word on packaging. It only lets me know I'm in for a low-grade waxy suck-fest.
posted by sourwookie at 9:54 PM on July 5, 2014

Mmm, original Klondike bars. In the '80s my family lived in N. Colorado in the test market for various products, some of which went national and some of which didn't. I seem to recall having a freezer full of proto-Klondike bars and a fridge full of proto-Cherry 7Up at the same time. It was a good summer.
posted by scody at 12:26 AM on July 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

The original Klondikes were pure Isaly's heaven. They used shredded caramel corn in the Crispy bar coating, making it addictively delicious. A friend's older brother described dipping his hand into a vat of crispy bits when nobody was looking so he could eat them off his fingers, which to a six-year-old Pittsburgh kid sounded JUST GREAT.

Thank you, Lexica, for erasing my last shreds of self-control vis-a-vis "summer dieting."
posted by kinnakeet at 8:26 AM on July 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

That magic shell stuff always makes me think about Apu's line in The Simpsons: "It's mostly just brown and water."
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:03 AM on July 6, 2014

If I could buy dry ice here in quantities less than 50lbs at a time I'd so make home made Klondike bars with Tiger or Bubblegum ice cream, wrap them in recycled Klondike bar wrappers, and then nonchalantly hand them out at our up coming family get together.
posted by Mitheral at 10:10 PM on July 7, 2014

Speaking of poor-quality ice cream: Why don't ice cream sandwiches melt anymore? (note auto-playing video)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 7:46 PM on July 25, 2014