Every British seaside has one, and you know it’s coming before you see it — that little tune drifting down the promenade, a sound about as reliable as the seagulls and twice as annoying. The van pulls up to the railings, the side hatch swings open, and a queue forms with the discipline of a post office on pension day. The children are handed their cones with the solemnity of a coronation. The adults are handed their cones and immediately regret the decision. That’s the deal, and everyone who’s ever stood in that queue has accepted it.
Which makes Frinton-on-Sea in Essex a bit of a puzzle, because they’ve banned the ice cream vans from the beach entirely. A seaside town that won’t let you lick on the sand is rather like a Sunday league team that’s taken the ball away. For the record, Frinton didn’t have a pub until 2000 and didn’t allow fish and chips until 1992, so the ice cream ban is less a policy and more a personality. They’ve simply decided that the seaside should be a place you think about, not a place you eat.
Dolly mixture, for the uninitiated, is a bag of little coloured fondant shapes and sugar-coated jellies — the sweeter, kinder cousin of liquorice allsorts, and the sweet most reliably handed to a child who has just asked for a second one. It’s the British seaside’s official topping: the thing that goes on the cone, in the hand, on the shirt. So this is a sundae that takes the whole promenade — the ice cream, the banana, the sauce, the cherry — and adds the dolly mixture, because if you’re going to do the British seaside, you do it properly.
The van is a sundae that leaves when it pleases. This one has to earn its keep, and it has to do it before the sun gets to it.
Ingredients
- 4 good scoops of vanilla ice cream — a supermarket tub will do, the one with “real vanilla” on the lid, not the beige block that’s mainly ambition
- 1 banana, halved lengthwise
- 80g dolly mixture — from the sweets aisle, not the biscuit aisle; they are separate departments and the biscuit aisle does not have them
- 2 tbsp chocolate sauce
- 2 tbsp caramel sauce
- A few tbsp of chantilly cream (or double cream, lightly whipped, if you have the energy)
- 4 maraschino cherries — a tin, they’ll keep
- Crushed digestives, for the crumb
- A little icing sugar, for the snow (optional, but the snow is the point)
Method
- Put your serving glass or a wide bowl in the freezer for a few minutes while you get everything out. The cold plate buys you about ninety seconds, which is the entire difference between a sundae and a science experiment.
- Scoop out the four balls of ice cream and set them in the glass. Don’t over-scoop — a sundae is a dish with a structure, and the structure is the ice cream. You’re not building a tower, you’re building a house with a roof, and the roof is load-bearing.
- Halve the banana lengthwise and lay the halves around the ice cream. The banana is the only honest ingredient in the whole banana split — the only part that’s actually in the name — so treat it with the respect it has earned.
- Zigzag the chocolate and caramel sauce over the top. Zigzag, don’t pour. A poured sauce is a puddle, and a puddle is what you get when the sun wins. The zigzag is the only defence you have, so zigzag it like you mean it.
- Scatter the dolly mixture over everything. This is the bit that makes it British. Do it with the confidence of a man who has never once been asked to stop — the fondant is the promenade, the jellies are the seagulls, and the whole thing now looks like the day it was meant to look.
- Rain the crushed digestives over the top. The crumbs are the pebbles on the promenade, the texture of a place you’ve walked a lot, and they give the first spoonful a crunch that the ice cream alone never could.
- Place the cherries on top, one per quadrant. The cherry is the flag on the pier — the thing that tells you the dish is finished and the clock has started. Place it, don’t fiddle. Fiddling is how you end up with a fifth cherry, and there is no fifth cherry.
- Finish with a dollop of chantilly on the side for the people who need the soft bit. The dolly mixture is the hard part, the chantilly is the soft part, and the whole thing is a seaside in a glass.
- Serve immediately and eat it fast. You are in a race with the sun, and the sun has never lost a race it didn’t want to win. The first drip is a sign. The second is a warning. The third is a statement of intent.
It’s a dish that has to be eaten in one sitting, the way the whole thing was always meant to be — before it all drips onto the tablecloth, which is the only thing on the British seaside worse than the ice cream itself.
