Magic Chocolate Shell

There’s nothing better than topping a homemade ice cream like my Banana Peanut Butter Ice Cream or Banana Frozen Yogurt with a chocolate shell. There are commercial options, but you’d be shocked to see that many of them don’t even contain chocolate or cocoa, only flavoring! They’re also often loaded with palm oil, sugar, and many additives. When you realize that making your own is healthier, super quick, and made with real chocolate, you’ll never buy the commercial version ever again!

Ingredients and Substitutions

This is a super easy recipe, only two ingredients.

Dark Chocolate Chips – I use 70% dairy-free dark chocolate chips. I generally try to avoid any chocolate chips with too much sugar as to make balancing the sweetness of the recipes easier. But you can use any chocolate chips you want or alternatively, a chocolate bar is also fine! Coconut Oil – Coconut oil is a very natural, very raw oil extracted from coconuts. It has the crucial characteristic of being solid at room temperature. This is the reason why this chocolate shell hardens on cold ice cream!

How Does It Work?

Coconut oil, like cocoa butter or dairy butter is a fat that is solid at room temperature. Coconut oil melts over 76 °F (24 °C) which makes it easy to use in the kitchen as it only takes a little bit of heating to turn it into a liquid you can pour. If you mix coconut oil with chocolate, this point at which is hardens become a bit higher, at about 90 °F (32 °C), depending on your ratio. If you just pour melted chocolate on your cold ice cream, it will still create a hard shell, but there are many benefits to adding coconut oil:

Shiny Finish – Without coconut oil, the chocolate hardens slower, leaving a matte finish that somehow looks less like chocolate! Even Thickness – The coconut oil makes the chocolate solidify faster, giving it a more uniform thickness. Easier to Bite – Coconut oil makes the chocolate softer and much easier to bite into without the brittleness of pure chocolate.

How to Use Magic Chocolate Shell

You can use this magic chocolate shell on any frozen or cold dessert. So you can pour it on:

Ice Cream – like my Banana Peanut Butter Ice Cream or Avocado Ice Cream Popsicles – make a larger batch and dip a whole Avocado Popsicles, Coconut Popsicles, or Banana Popsicles. Frozen Yogurt – like my Banana Frozen Yogurt or Strawberry Frozen Yogurt.