Ice Magic Sauce
They just don’t make desserts like they used to back in the eighties. Maybe it’s my nostalgic memory tricking me into thinking that things just tasted better back then, or maybe it’s the tighter sugar controls that we have now, but I remember the magic that was Ice Magic Sauce being our absolute favourite dessert topping back when I was a child.
What was Ice Magic Sauce?
Ice Magic was an incredible sauce that was designed to be drizzled over ice cream. The sauce would form a crispy, hard shell when it came into contact with the freezing cold ice cream and biting into it was pretty amazing. It was sold in the UK as Bird’s Ice Magic, but it had different names in different parts of the world.
The sauce actually originated in Australia and was known there as Cottees Ice Magic. It came in a range of different flavours including chocolate, mint chocolate, honeycomb chocolate and strawberry.
This sauce was also sold in the USA where it was known as Magic Shell.
The main difference between Ice Magic Sauce and any other chocolate sauce was that it hardened when it cooled and formed a hard shell on top of ice cream. I always liked mine on vanilla ice cream, the combination of the hard chocolate shell and the soft vanilla ice cream was something else!
Because Ice Magic sauce hardened when it got cold, it was really important not to store it in the fridge. If you did make that mistake though, you could just run the bottle under the hot tap for a short while until the sauce returned to the correct consistency.
Can you still buy Ice Magic?
Unfortunately, Ice Magic is no longer sold in the UK, but I have found some pretty good alternatives.
Another option is to make your own, and it couldn’t really be any simpler to do.
How to make your own Ice Magic sauce
The key to making your own Ice Magic or Magic Shell sauce is knowing the active ingredients. The key ingredients that give the shell effect to Magic Shell are coconut oil and sunflower oil. These both contain high levels of saturated fat which when mixed with chocolate form a solid at a higher temperature than usual. You can recreate the sauce with just one of the oils though depending on what you have available.
Simply mix around 120 grams of your melted chocolate with one tablespoon of oil and voila, you have your very own hard shell chocolate sauce.
You could mix it up a little and create your own delicious flavours such as chocolate orange or even white chocolate.
