How To Recreate This Ice Cream Trend At Home

From turning ice cream into bread to topping it with everything from olive oil to chili crisp, ice cream trends tend to be as simple as they are inventive. But a new trend of dipping a soft-serve cone in melted butter may actually be deceptively difficult, necessitating a few key steps before you can do it properly.

While you can use regular ice cream rather than soft-serve, you might find that you've licked away the shell long before you come close to finishing off the cone itself. Soft-serve allows you to get a bit more bite into each motion, balancing the frozen treat with the butter so that one doesn't overwhelm the other. And while the trick of it all only requires you to give your cone a thorough spin in a bowl of melted butter, temperature is a major consideration. If your cone is too warm, it'll drip into the butter rather than freeze the coating into a shell. If your butter is too hot, it'll melt your treat, but if it's too cold, it won't be liquid enough to coat.

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BUTTER DIPPED ICE CREAM 🍦🧈 If you're curious how I got the soft serve in my home kitchen peep the end of the video. #ıcecream #butter #recipe #cooking

♬ Oui, oui, oui, oui – Sacha Distel

Since butter will be such a forward flavor here, you'll want to opt for some of the best store-bought brands, such as Kerrygold or Tillamook. For the best flavor, pick a full-fat brand that comes in bars or bricks rather than tubs of oil-and-butter blends made for spreading. Also, a salted variety complements all the sugar in your dessert, bringing out its flavor with a bit of contrast.

Even if you don't transform ice cream into soft-serve at home, there are plenty of ways to add new tastes to this frozen treat. From simple, easy toppings to seasoning the butter directly, this dessert is meant to be easy, and keeping it that way lets the flavor of the two main ingredients take center stage.

If you want a bit of extra texture and don't have any salted butter on hand, a sprinkle of flaky sea salt is crunchy and delicious. If you use a particularly mild-tasting ice cream, like vanilla, this gives you an excuse to experiment with whatever fancy salts you have on hand, like smoked varieties or ones infused with truffle. For fruitier varieties, try sprinkling them with a bit of Tajín, providing both heat and acidity to make the whole thing far more complex. Whenever you add a topping, be sure to do it right away, when the butter is still wet. This helps your sprinkling of flavor adhere to the surface before it hardens.

Making a compound butter is deceptively easy for how great the results can be. While you need enough time to let the main ingredient soften and toss together your add-ins, just about anything you'd add to a dessert is a candidate for this trick. Molasses-heavy sugars like turbinado are great for a discreet, heavier flavor, but anything from orange zest to even herbs like basil and lavender can seriously upgrade even the best-tasting butters.