Photo free from the wonderful Unsplash.

Yay! An orange creamsicle with chocolate rice bits rose thingie!

Turns out that with the right tool (yay trowel), making icecream roses is really quite easy, and rather fun!

The trick is to start off with thin squarish pieces for the base, rotating the cone as you go along.

Then, towards the outer bit of the flowers, slowly start using thin rectangular pieces, rather than squarish ones, for the outer petals.

Also best done with icecream right out of the freezer - letting it melt just makes things messier and more squidgy.

Smooth icecreams are obviously the easiest to work with, but chunky icecreams work fine too, except for marshmallows. The darn things bounce all over the place and don't cut very well. And even if you manage to cut them, they try to fall off the petals...

Interestingly, these roses pack a LOT of icecream into a single cone. About 2 scoops worth, even if it doesn't look that way.

They also offer a nice way to mix flavours! So far I've just done the centre as one flavour, with outer petals as other flavours, but this is mostly because I only have one trowel...

21 cones later, it takes me about 2-3 minutes to make one rose. It's really very easy, once you get the basic concept down. Plus, as mentioned before, it gives the icecream a super 'fluffy' mouthfeel.

Now I'm wondering why this isn't more popular at icecream / gelato / frozen yoghurt shops.

If you want to try it out, but don't want to get a trowel...you can use a pie slicer, but their tapered heads are far from ideal. It's hard to get good leverage, and even harder to cut the icecream in thin slices. You'll end up with a different shape of petal, that can be quite tricky to maneuver. It's not unpossible (see previous post), but the trowel makes a HUGE difference, and isn't expensive.

I stared creepily at the video, watching it over and over.

First attempt on back of a mug with a pie slicer... could see possibilities, but the icecream kept trying to slide off the mug back.

Second attempt on an icecream cone, with softened icecream and cake slicer - icecream was too soft, would not hold structural integrity, though the intentions could be seen.

This is my third attempt! Where the thing, while obviously crafted by an incompetent nugget, definitely has hints of where it COULD go...

Moohaha. ONWARDS! FOR SCIENCE!

Also has the interesting side-effect of giving the icecream a 'fluffier' mouthfeel. And, enthusiastically related by Nuggetboy (I prefer making icecream to eating it, so he has eating duties), 'Ooh this is great it goes all the way to the bottom of the cone!'

From a white paper by Endeavour Partners on the Future of Retail.

It's pretty good, but (as mentioned above), I've yet to see a white paper that addresses this point.

I think maybe it’s because when it’s in person, it devalues the whole, ‘I feel like a special snowflake cause she remembers me’, because it becomes, ‘I feel like a number in a list cause she just very obviously looked me up to try to sell to me’. XD

Poor Creationstorm. I shoulda cancelled when they got bought.

Update
So as of this post, they suddenly deign to reply to me.

Yeah, yeah. And the dog totally ate my homework.

It may not have led to a conversion in my case, but it did lead to LOL and sharing...

Read an interesting post by Mark Boulton - Not a craftsman.

I usually like what he's written, but in this case, I have to disagree. He's defining it wrong. ;)

But wai nugget?

Well see...

"If my uncle was restoring traction engines for a living, he would’ve been out of business. Craft is love. And love takes time. And time is scarce and probably best spent elsewhere."

That statement immediately made me think of the story where Picasso does a little sketch in 5 min. A potential buyer goes 'Omg! How can you charge <whatever ridiculous sum> for something that took you 5 min to do?!?!' Picasso looks down his nose regally, and replies, 'That, ma'am, took me my whole life.' (Or something similar.)

I disagree that craft has to be slow. Yes, love takes time. Expertise takes time. But that doesn't mean you bill your 10k hours to your clients directly. The 10k hours you have under your belt are what affects the asking price you give to clients! The 10k hours are the love.

The 10k hours are your craftperson's gift to the leanan sidhe that you can never get back. ;)

Also, because everything is always about food, anyone who thinks craft has to be slow has never watched a real sushi chef at work. XD

Someday, I really need to:

1. Come up with better names for my icecreams
2. Overcome my laziness and start documenting the insane number of different icecream flavours I make

...but today is not that day.

Today's lazy 'recipe' is instead, a bunch of links!

I got the idea from these two places…

http://www.thelondoner.me/2011/06/slutty-brownies.html

and

http://whatsgabycooking.com/slutty-brownies/

…but of course, being me, I changed stuff a bit…

I didn’t use a brownie base, I used my own flourless chocolate cake base here
http://nugget.posthaven.com/flourless-triple-chocolate-cake-of-lazy-doom

I was lazy for the cookie dough and used a Betty Crocker mix. You can of course, use your own nummy version!

I baked the thing for 40-50 minutes at 180C, non-fan-forced. Check on it often towards the last 10 minutes, because you don't want the cookie bits to overcook/burn.