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 |