Final Friday Fiction: Ice Cream Wars (Another F hi-jacking)

Far away in time, in a future where conventional warfare is banned by an international convention that everyone sticks to, humans still have not been able to curb their enthusiasm for fighting one another.  The French, ever the promoters of international diplomacy, confused bomb with bombe and at some stage started flinging frozen desserts at their enemies dropping them out of aeroplanes and delivering them mounted on inter-continental missiles.  As the ice-cream wars developed, each country adopted a signature ice-cream flavour designed to best represent their own tastes and to insult and disgust those at whom they launched them.

Dutch missiles delivered orange and chocolate chip, the Germans chose black cherry, Italians preferred cassata, and the English developed a frozen rhubarb and custard confection guaranteed to knock out the taste buds of every namby-pamby within 100 miles of a bombe crater. Only hardy souls can eat rhubarb and custard without wincing.

The French by the way, having started this convention, were recognized by their cassis (or blackcurrant) flavoured instruments of warfare.

In the Pacific all the island groups had banded together to claim signature coconut ice-cream warheads, but it backfired somewhat as their under-developed missile systems failed to be able to deliver their bombes much beyond neighbouring islands with the result that no one knew who was shooting at them – or whether their own ice-cream bombes had exploded in their refrigeration bunkers never having left home.

Baron Guy wasn’t best pleased with this development.  He still had half a lake of strawberry jam to sell and now, in the ice-cream arms race, only the Danes were buying strawberry.  His market had collapsed.  Denmark is a very small country and although they had a lot of dairy products used in making good ice-cream, they had decided to sell most of it on the international arms trading market, rather than create bombes at home.  They were getting rich on cream but they weren’t using their wealth to buy at lot of strawberry jam.

As he looked out his palace window wondering what do with all this jam, a raspberry ripple in a huge pink wafer cone flashed past and exploded onto his personal runway on the other side of the lake.  “Bother“, he thought, “the Norwegians are at it again.  They have got nothing better to do in the frozen north than to make ice-cream and lob it at their neighbours.”

He rang his snow-plough team and sent them out to clear the runway.  Baroness Erin might want to use their personal jet at short notice and she would get cross about delays caused by a mound of slowly melting ice-cream.  It was January, and at this time of year it would melt very slowly.  Nobody wanted raspberry ripple ice-cream in the middle of winter so he couldn’t give it away.

No one had tired of eating ice-cream, but occasionally a war would be started between two distant nations just to get a change of menu.  No one bombed the USA.  Their peanut butter and cookie dough ice-cream was heavy, hard, sticky, and sickly-sweet – like being hit by a half sucked toffee.  Venezuela, on the other hand, with its double chocolate bombes (with ganache centre) never had a day in which it wasn’t splurged by 15 different flavours from around the world in a desperate attempt to provoke them into firing back.  Ice-cream melts very fast in Venezuela, so bombes that made it there were less ice-cream and more puddle-of-yoghurt-on-the-pavement.

Quite frankly warfare had become an international food fight (with no one allowed to fire bread rolls).  The Venezuelans had developed a strategy in which they would only return fire on a country that could deliver decent ice-cream, still frozen and preferably in a waffle cone.  The arms race was on.  Everyone wanted to be the first to develop a long-range ice-cream delivery system that could hit Venezuela with a still frozen ice-cream bombe.  Unbeknownst to anyone, the English had a secret weapon.  Rhubarb ice-cream is so frozen that spoons bend when you try to dig into it.  The custard had been added to the flavour to soften it up a bit.  No one else was making pure rhubarb ice-cream bombes so all the English had to do was make rhubarb bombes without the custard, freeze them solid, and work out how to fire them as far as Venezuela, and in return they would have all the double chocolate ice-cream they could handle.  The Venezuelans had a huge stockpile of unexploded chocolate bombes.

Baroness Erin had an industrial laboratory and a huge research team working day and night on rhubarb bombe development.  Baron Guy had his research scientists designing and testing delivery systems; special high-speed returnable drones loaded with bombes that could fly to Venezuela as fast as a rocket, and come back again for another load.  Baron Guy was very keen on recycling and didn’t see the point of wasting a long-range rocket for every bombe.  In fact, his prototype drones ended up flying right around the earth because at the speed they were travelling it turned out to be more efficient to carry on than try to turn around and come back the way they had gone out. 

The drones were nearly ready for their first bombe-ing trial but there seemed to be a hold up on the bombe development side of the research; keeping them frozen hard was no longer a problem, but they still knocked out namby-pamby taste-buds.   Finally the scientists hit on the solution – a two layer bombe.  The inner layer was a solid rhubarb ice-cream and the outer layer was a custard mousse; a fluffy layer with millions of the air bubbles that made it light but firm, and an excellent insulating material.  Then in a final stroke of genius that won them the Great Bake-off trophy that year, Baroness Erin and her scientists developed a super BOMBE made up of bombe-lets, each coated in custard mousse, and held together like seeds in a pomegranate.  When this super BOMBE exploded over a Venezuelan city, hundreds of homes would be hit be their own family serving of frozen rhubarb and custard dessert.

Soon Venezuela and England were engaged in all out warfare.  Bombes flew both ways in ferocious campaigns that rained ice-cream down on both nations for months.  Now every time a bombe exploded on his private runway, Barons Guy’s snowplough team raced out to rescue it and rush it into cold storage.  Our Strawberry Barons became known as the Chocolate Bombe Barons and did secret arms deals with the Danes and others in which they exchanged their stashed chocolate bombes for 43 other flavours from around the world – and they sold these to restaurants, high class ice-cream vendors, and sea-side parlours.

For their services to dessert, the Queen awarded them both big medals, and each a hat with ostrich plumes and a big jewelled hat pin of rubies and yellow diamonds (to represent rhubarb and custard), and they were feted wherever they went.

 

 Aunty YAM's blog - final friday fiction