Connoisseur Chocolate Obsession Ice Cream Recipe: My Journey

In Australia, we once had the greatest ice cream in the world, called Chocolate Obsession. It wasn’t just any ordinary chocolate ice cream. It had chocolate flakes and, most characteristically, a kind of red mystery sauce that I could never figure out.

For years, I had been trying to figure out the recipe. Since the ice cream was discontinued more than a decade ago, you couldn’t even find an ingredient list no matter how hard you googled!

But this was the ice cream of my childhood, and of my dreams. It was my single most favorite ice cream, a perfect pinch of sourness with exactly the right texture of ice cream.

The chocolate ice-cream part

Whilst it was impossible to find out a precise replica, I was absolutely delighted years later to find the Haagen Dazs Belgian Chocolate had a very similar flavour profile and chocolate chip chunks.

The sauce

But, there was still a mystery as to what sauce it had! When you googled it, all you could find were petitions for Peters to bring the ice-cream back.

You couldn’t even find an image of the front of the ice-cream. ChatGPT didn’t know what was in the ice cream. Google didn’t.

I was talking about how impossible this ice cream was to find, with my Mum. I searched for half an hour.

But then: I found something!

On some random website, there was a broken link to the ice cream, from some catalogue.

It was broken and the page wasn’t loading.

Was this the end?

Breakthrough

I decided to use the Wayback Machine.

And there it was: not an ingredient list, but a single one paragraph description:

Aha!!! Cherry brandy sauce!

An experiment

But wait…what was that?

I’ve never made cherry brandy sauce in my life.

Still, I had to do my best to try.

I needed cherry jam, and brandy, and to combine it with my Haagen Dasz Belgian Chocolate ice cream.

Could this be it? The ice cream of my dreams?

Chocolate Obsession: A near identical recipe

I can’t believe it.

It worked.

Here’s the exact ingredients I used, and how to cook it.

Ingredients:

1. Haagen Dasz Belgian Chocolate Ice-Cream. These just come in small tubs at the supermarket.
2. Black Cherry Jam. I just randomly bought the jam below. I used the whole 284 grams. Any cherry jam would do. It’s important to use jam, because the pectin acts as a thickener.
3. Brandy. I’ve used about 30mL of VSOP brandy, just because it came in a tiny bottle.

How to cook

1. Heat the 284g of cherry jam in a saucepan on medium heat. Stir and break up the cherries. The jam should melt to a liquid form.
2. Add 30-40mL VSOP whisky. Keep stirring.
3. Add two pinches of salt.
4. After a few minutes, the jam and the brandy should somewhat evaporate. The sauce is a bit thicker.
5. Add this directly to the Haagen Dazs Belgian Chocolate ice cream. Make sure to fold it into the ice-cream!

And that’s it! The most incredible ice-cream on earth.

Why post about ice-cream?

This recipe is impossible to find otherwise. However, maybe you are someone that — like me — loves and remembers this ice-cream from a decade ago.

In a sense, it is an ice-cream of the past. I doubt that many ice-cream companies would be allowed to put literal brandy in their sauce. It’s too expensive and also has health risks for kids and the pregnant.

So this ice-cream will almost never return to commercial shelves. I doubt Peter’s would tell me their recipe, either.

This post is written for no other reason than this was the ice-cream of my childhood. It is the most scrumptious, delectable thing ever. I jumped with joy showing my sister, a big overreaction to a single dish.

But, to me, it’s more than just an ice-cream. It is symbol of a time — a youth — that I can no longer return to.

If you too enjoyed this ice-cream, then email me. Hopefully, I’ll still be on Twitter and YouTube for many years yet (x.com/dabidoyt and YouTube.com/@dabi).

I really hope it gives you as much delight as it has given me. And I hope for this to be a record of a lost legendary dish!