To dip or not to dip

There's nothing quite like a small vanilla and chocolate twist in a cone on a beautiful balmy summer evening. And there's certainly nothing like having an old summer job haunt your choice at the window.

For two glorious high school summers I had the privilege to work at our one traffic light town's ice cream stand, called Custer's Last Stand. (Personally I think it would have been funnier if the name had been Custard's Last Stand, but what do I know?) This was a very convenient job for me, especially since I did not have my driver's license for the first summer that I worked there. It was in walking distance from my house, and the other people working there were great. I really had a lot of fun! While working there, I learned how to make the perfect cone (it's all in the wrist), how to make shakes, egg cremes (the first time I had a customer request one I looked around for eggs!), banana splits, and sundaes. I also learned that scooping hard ice cream is an absolute pain in the rear end.

But the hardest things to do were dips. Yup, that's right, dipping the ice cream into the hot dip was challenging. There was an art to it that I eventually learned, but many ice cream tops ended up in the actual dip instead of remaining on the cone. The dip had to be the perfect consistency so as not to weigh the ice cream down and pull it off the cone, and the ice cream had to be really anchored into the base of the cone. Dipping was difficult, and I cringed each time a customer ordered one, but that isn't the reason I refuse to order one now that I'm on the other side of the counter! The dip comes hardened in a giant can and has to be scooped out and put into a warmer where it then melts into the dip that later hardens on each ice cream cone. Now, here's the part that prevents me from ever ordering dip again: the entire top third of the can is a layer of hardened fat, not unlike Crisco, while the bottom two thirds contains the flavor and color of the dip. In order to get a desirable consistency of dip that would harden without pulling the ice cream off the cone, we had to scoop a very generous portion of that fat into the dip. I'm being mild with the word 'generous'. There was a lot of fat in that dip. I have forever been ruined from having a dipped cone! Dippers beware - do you know what's in your dip????

Bon appetit!