My first job was working in an ice cream stand. No, that’s a lie. My first job was cleaning the gym where I did gymnastics and I made $10 a week, before taxes. Right, because they took taxes out of my paycheck, which left me with a whopping $7 a week. I’m guessing the aim of that job was to teach me responsibility.
But my first real job was working in an ice cream stand. I spent the summer after I turned fourteen, scooping ice cream cones, making frappes (those are milkshakes for all you non-New England people), and perfecting my banana splits. Seriously, I made a mean banana split. I also mastered the art of the soft serve cone. I loved it. To this day, I think it’s still my favorite job ever. EVER.
The only thing I didn’t like was making those soft serve cones with those hard chocolate shells. You first made a regular ice cream cone, that had to turn it upside down to dip it into the liquid shell topping where it inevitably fell out of the cone and you ended up with a melty puddle of ice cream in the middle of a vat of liquid chocolate. I think over the entire summer I only successfully dipped like three of those cones.
So today when our new friends Erin and Mike came over for dinner and an ice cream party and Erin said she was going to make her homemade magic shell I wasn’t really sure what to expect.
It was awesome. I mean, seriously, it was magical. After a quick drizzle, the shiny chocolate started to harden just like the stuff you get at the ice cream stands. The secret is coconut oil. Coconut oil melts and solidifies at a fairly low temperature so after heating it up for a little while with a healthy amount of chocolate, you can drizzle it onto ice cream and after a few seconds it hardens like magic!
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