Homemade dilly bars

We made the perfect summer treat today:

When I was a kid I loved going to Dairy Queen and watching them make the dilly bar by hand... I was fascinated with how fast the shell would harden.  They were soooo good!

Today dilly bars come pre-packaged :(

Lame!

Anyway I recently spied some cherry chips at the supermarket and snagged them up, dreaming of the DQ worker plunging my vanilla ice cream into the cherry topping and thought I could replicate it.  Since I already had chocolate chips at home, I snagged a bag of butterscotch chips and skipped away... dilly bars come in 3 flavors you know: cherry, butterscotch & the classic chocolate.  
Since they're a trio we had to make ALL the flavors ;)

To make your own dilly bars, 
you'll simply need vanilla ice cream, a pie pan, chips & a few tongue depressors.

Be prepared to have patience and lots of it!

1. Spoon ice cream into pie pan and let harden.

Wait 1 hour or until ice cream is firm.

2. Once ice cream is hard, use round cutter* and insert tongue depressor.
*Or something similar; thank you Pampered Chef measuring cup!

More waiting... about 30 mins.

3. Separate chips into bowls.
4. Melt chips, {I put in microwave for 30 seconds, stir, repeat until it's smooth.}

Dash those dreams of dipping like the old pro's because I have NO idea how DQ does it {my ice cream melted & the shell wouldn't stay put. Boo.} 


You'll have to settle for the Lolly Jane way:

5. Insert tongue depressor into ice cream & spread a thin layer of melted chips on wax paper and put the ice cream bar on top.  
6. Work fast and simply pour the melted chips on the bar until it's covered and rush frantically place the bars back into the freezer.  If you want to add the classic dilly bar swirl, now's the time to do it- just take a spoonful of the melted chips and pour into a swirl shape. Easy peasy!

Those puppies get hot so wait at least 2 hours until the ice cream re-freezes inside the bars.

Note: We cut off the excess hardened shell to make it look more like a dilly bar vs. a melted pile of delicious flavored chips.  To do this we used a warm knife and it worked like magic!

Last step, give to happy kids :)

Gotta love Delaney's lipstick stained face ;)

If you have any tips for ice cream dipping, we'd love to hear it!

Linking up {here & here} this week!