The New Ice Cream Social: Celebrate with Sweets & Sparkling Wine

The ice cream social is making a comeback. We’re reinventing the old fashioned get-together by turning it into a sophisticated soiree featuring decadent desserts and sparkling wine.

Invite friends over for a sampling of sweet treats and bottles of bubbly, and turn any ordinary day into a sophisticated celebration. Unlike a dinner party – which can be a big, costly, and stressful endeavor – throwing this kind of party requires little prep work, and allows for a lot of flexibility since you can host your party post-dinner any night of the week, or even on a weekend afternoon. Follow our easy plan for an amazingly low maintenance and budget-friendly entertaining idea.

Plan your fête by choosing three or more flavors of frozen treats to make a "flight," and a luscious wine to pair with each. Purists will love sampling classic ice cream flavors like Vanilla, Strawberry, and Coffee with a selection of white and rosé Champagnes (which must, by law, come from France’s Champagne region to be labeled as such). But there’s no reason to limit yourself to those core flavors. The Häagen-Dazs® brand offers more than 50 perfectly crafted varieties of ice cream, gelato, frozen yogurt, sorbet and bars, so have fun exploring new flavors in addition to old favorites.

Try assembling a caramel collection with Häagen-Dazs Sea Salt Caramel gelato, Dulce de Leche and Caramel Cone ice creams. Match them with Italian Proseccos on the sweeter side, which will be labeled demi-sec or dry. Or, choose light, fruit-forward varieties like sweet Orchard Peach sorbet, bright Limoncello gelato, and tropical Pineapple Coconut ice cream paired with a trio of sweet white and rosé Cavas, Spain’s affordable answer to Champagne. Chocolate-lovers (meaning everyone – who doesn’t crave chocolate?) can choose from a whopping 11 Häagen-Dazs varieties, including Midnight Cookies & Cream, Dark Chocolate Chip gelato, and Rocky Road. Serve them with a flight of chilled pink and red sparkling wines, like a bubbly Moscato rosé from California, or Lambrusco, a fizzy Italian red that’s gained popularity in recent years.

Party prep is a cinch. Simply set out wine glasses on a bar or buffet, plus pretty dessert bowls, spoons, and napkins, and ice buckets. Just before guests arrive, bring the ice creams out of the freezer so they have time to soften, and set out a few bowls filled with warm water and ice cream scoops for serving. Place both the sparkling wines and the desserts in order from lightest-to-heaviest so your guests can sample from left to right. You can even set up a blind taste test so they can guess the varieties of wines and frozen desserts. Encourage everyone to sample through the flights and try different pairings. Your favorite flavor combination might be one you haven’t tried yet.

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Jeni Britton Bauer’s Favorite Ice Cream Spots in the World

“I love all ice cream,” says expert Jeni Britton Bauer of Ohio’s Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. “When I go to a city I look for the longest line. I don’t think about business at all. I just go to enjoy the regional specialty, for the pure pleasure of it.” Smitten Ice Cream uses liquid nitrogen to freeze ice cream. Photo © Gil Riego Jr., first published by SFWeekly.

In New York I always visit Meredith Kurtzman at Otto. She makes the gelatos for all of Mario Batali’s restaurants. She is in a unique position in the world of ice cream in that, I believe, she gets an unlimited budget. They’re not making money on their gelato, they just want it to be really great. So she can do things that other ice cream makers can’t, like a quince gelato where she’s gone and picked the quince and made it into a sorbet. She’ll usually come out and we’ll have pizza and eight bowls of ice cream.

I’m really excited about what some people are doing with liquid nitrogen, like Smitten in San Francisco. They freeze it in this machine that the owner developed, which I think is supercool.

In Italy there’s a gelato shop in Bologna that is really fantastic. Their pistachio was awesome, and they had a hazelnut gelato which was amazing, with hazelnuts from the Piedmont region. Until about 2004, I had no money to travel. But everybody would tell me about these Italian ice cream makers, and I just assumed they were mind-blowingly good. I created my ice cream with what I imagined the greatest ice cream in the world would taste like. When I finally got to Italy, most of it was incredibly underwhelming, made from mixes. This one’s not.

In Nice, in France, I love Fenocchio. They have two locations on different squares. They push these ice cream dipping cabinets out into the squares, it’s just cool the way they do it. I love their ice cream cones; they are very crispy, kind of like American sugar ones but better, more buttery. The ice cream, the texture is a little more like gelato but richer.

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How to Make Ice Cream

To make ice cream like an artisan, start by picking your style: simple American or lush, custardy French.

Few people go into an ice cream store and wonder, American or French? Yet ice cream artisans in the US generally focus on one of these two categories: American-style (also called Philadelphia-style), made with sugar, milk and cream; and French-style, prepared with an egg custard. At Seattle’s Molly Moon’s ice cream shops, owner Molly Neitzel sells only the American style. “I love how easy it is to make, and I love its pure cream taste,” she says. “It’s the best way to showcase fresh fruit and herbs.” But she and Christina Spittler, head chef and co-author of a new cookbook, Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream, also enjoy the lush texture of the French style. (The lecithin in egg yolks helps prevent ice crystals.) “Nuts, butterscotch and caramel go great with that custardy flavor,” says Spittler. Turn the page for their best recipes, plus fun flavor ideas like salted caramel or blackberries with fresh sage.

Homemade ice cream doesn’t contain gums and stabilizers like store-bought does, so try to eat it within a few days.

American-style ice cream with strawberries and jalapeño

Add flavorings to the ice cream maker at the beginning of the freezing cycle.

1 cup broken chocolate-and-toffee-covered saltines or pretzels

3/4 cup blackberry preserves mixed with 1 tablespoon minced fresh sage

3/4 cup pourable salted-caramel sauce

1 cup strawberries macerated in 3 tablespoons sugar with 1 teaspoon minced jalapeño

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