This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
"I loved our Saturday-night trips to Colonial Ice Cream, where we always ordered the same thing – one turtle sundae, one Snickers pie, one double chocolate brownie – and then split them among us.”
Childhood friendships. Together you’re invincible. Together you can walk the school corridors united and without fear.
Darcy and Rachel have been friends since school. As adults, food is used by Darcy and Rachel when recalling their childhood. The taste, the smell and what they were doing whilst eating it.
For Darcy it was the childish joys of “Fruit Loops! Rootbeer! Cranapple juice! And Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip ice cream!” and sitting down in front of the TV with Rachel while they guzzled the artificial, lurid, fruitless hoops. That first mouthful she took as an adult wouldn’t be so much a taste as a memory. If you close your eyes for the merest of moments, the briefest flicker, you are back in your childhood with your schoolmates and you remember exactly what you were doing with them at the time. And names you normally can’t recall are there in your head along with their faces and their clothes. Put there by a childhood flavour.
For Rachel, looking back on her friendship with Darcy, she is wistful about moments involving food. When eating, tucking in with her friends, she felt she belonged to something. The three girls, Rachel, Darcy, Annalise had a routine. They always ordered the same deserts. They always went to the same place. And it was always on a Saturday night.
The food chosen to remember their childhood perfectly captures the characters of both women.
Ingredients for four sundaes
You will need to assemble these with your friends otherwise they’ll melt into one gloopy (but admittedly rather delicious) mess.
1 tub good quality vanilla ice cream
Hot fudge Sauce, bought or homemade (see below)
Hot caramel sauce, bought or homemade (see below)
Toasted pecans, crushed
Ingredients for the hot fudge sauce
100ml single cream
100g fudge
Ingredients for the hot caramel sauce
250g caster sugar
142ml pot double cream
50g butter
Equipment
Four sundae glasses, two heavy bottomed saucepans, ice cream scoop.
Method
- To make the fudge sauce – heat the cream and fudge in a heavy bottomed saucepan, very gently, until the fudge has melted.
- To make the caramel sauce – place sugar into a heavy bottomed pan with the butter.
- Heat gently until the butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved.
- Turn up the heat for four to five minutes until you get a golden caramel colour (like the inside of a Cadburys Crunchie).
- Add the cream. BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN YOU ADD THE CREAM AS IT WILL BUBBLE UP.
- THE SAUCE WILL STAY HOT FOR A LONG TIME SO BE CAREFUL.
- Scoop the ice cream into a sundae dish.
- Add a drizzle of hot fudge sauce and hot caramel sauce.
- Sprinkle with pecans.
- Serve and eat immediately.