While scooping a bowl of vanilla ice cream the other day, it suddenly dawned on me to employ a childhood tactic and add some chocolate. We rarely had chocolate syrup, but there always seemed to be cocoa powder or chocolate chips lurking in the pantry.

Mixing cocoa powder, water and sugar – while chocolately – was grainy and too much like hot chocolate. Melted chocolate chips didn’t pour and froze on contact with the ice cream.