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I just discovered the fascinating world of tempering chocolate. I've read about it before, but I never tried it until recently.
So, being the adventurous fellow that I am, I tried making my own chocolate-coated ice cream bars.

My first attempts were not successful. I ended up with melt-in-your-hand chocolate, which is exactly what I was trying to avoid.

It might be as simple as not having tempered the chocolate properly, but before I experiment too much more, I wanted to know if I could be successful at all.

Is it possible to make a chocolate-coated ice cream bar that doesn't melt all over your fingers?

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    Nobody puts chocolate on an ice cream bar. What you get in the supermarket is ice cream coated in "cocoa containing fat glaze". It is mostly a fat (not cocoa butter) with sugar and additives to make it stiff, glossy and nonmelty. It also has some cocoa for color. No fascinating tempering required, and you get no high quality chocolate product with this glamorous taste we all love. I am afraid you must either include a wrapper with your bars, or experiment with some other confect.
    – rumtscho ♦
    Jul 20, 2011 at 8:45
  • It sounds like a very hard problem. Chocolate, like many impure mixtures, melts gradually. But you want it to be slightly soft at -18C (else it shatters) and not very soft at +35C (else it really melts in your hand). That means its melting traject has to span more than 50 degrees C.
    – MSalters
    Jul 21, 2011 at 13:38

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I have also dabbled in tempering chocolate, but have never been able to get something that you could hold for a while without melting in your hands. I've also never tried coating ice cream bars.

I think you should be able to do it with a high fat(butter, cocoa butter, coconut oil) chocolate mixture. It will probably seem like entirely too much fat, but that is going to firm up and become a shell when wrapped around something cold and creamy. Here's a recipe for "magic shell" (I'm sure that is actually trademarked by Hersheys) that that goes something like 2:3 cocoanut oil to chocolate. That should give you something that resists dripping down your hand.

Then again, you could always just make ice cream pops instead. Just shove a popcicle stick in it and you have clean hands, but that's not what you asked.

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