Drumsticks! (Vietnamese Ice Coffee Ice Cream Flavor)

At last, the final installment of the drumstick-making adventure. I can't wait to try these!

I wrapped the candy-coated-cones in wax paper. This took a little trial-and-error, which will come back to haunt us later in the tale, but at last I figured out a system that seemed to allow there to be a nice tight roll around the cone that seemed like it would hold the ice cream in. Earlier in the week I'd improvised a little rack from the cone packaging to help the cones stand up straight, and I thought I'd figured out that the cones would stick in the rack. They did when wrapped in wax paper, but ...

Next I took the soft-frozen ice cream out of the maker and spooned it into the cones. This is when I discovered that my little rack wasn't deep enough to hold the newly-heavy cones upright once they were filled. They would have fit perfectly in champagne flutes, but the flutes-plus-cones won't fit in my freezer. In the end I gave up and just lay them down on a cookie sheet in the freezer.

I let them freeze hard for a couple hours, then pulled out the magic shell. It was soft-solid at room temperature, so I put the plastic container in a bowl of the hottest water I could get to come out of my tap (we don't have a microwave) and stirred until it was liquid again. For future reference, this is a perfect solution.

Then I dipped each cone in the magic shell, sprinkled them with broken slivered almonds, and we've got Vietnamese-ice-coffee drumsticks!

A couple of additional notes: I ended up doing a second layer of magic shell inside the cones, which I think helped. I used the organic cones available at my local market (Union Market) for most of the cones, but I had a couple of old school ones left over from another weekend, and those seem less soggy than the organic ones. And the cones that I wrapped and filled early, before I figured out a good system, had some ice cream leakage out the sides and around the outside of the cones, and again are a little soggy. But I'm serving them this afternoon anyway. 

Photos (credit the Chief Taste Tester, also now known as the Chief Photographer):

Cone filled with ice cream, just before dipping

Dipping in magic shell

Swirl it around to coat the whole thing

Sprinkle with almonds

One finished drumstick

The whole finished shebang

Vietnamese Ice Coffee

Next step in the drumstick-making-extravaganza was the innards. Sweet coffee - what could be better than Vietnamese Ice Coffee Ice Cream for combining with chocolatey goodness? 

I got the Chief Taste Tester to make some coffee while she made dinner last night. I asked for "very strong." I'm not sure I really conveyed how strong I wanted it, because I think she just made a bit stronger than the stuff we drink rather than the 1/2 c grounds to 1 1/2 c water recommended, but I think that's ok even though mine didn't turn out quite as dark as the photos suggested.

Today I realized that a single batch just wouldn't do to fill the 15 cones I'd prepared (or feed my 12 friends!) and luckily the CTT had made enough coffee for a double batch. Since the coffee had been made since yesterday and chilled in the freezer, I put together:
2 c coffee
2 cans sweetened condensed milk (about 2 cups, which is what the recipe called for)
2/3 c milk
2 T ground coffee

Whisked it all up in a bowl and straight into the freezer it went.

The next post will feature the making of the drumsticks, but since I ran out of space in the freezer I let the CTT have a chocolate-coated-on-the-inside cone filled with straight-from-the-machine ice cream. Her first taste prompted a "it tastes more like chocolate covered coffee beans than ice cream" but by the third bite she was hooked.