Eat banana splits

Ice-cream, bananas, a hot nutty sauce – and a cherry on top

Each week we celebrate the love of a good snack, with genius ideas for eating for pure pleasure – either solo or with friends… Whatever kind of summer you’ve had, it’s time to ceremoniously place a maraschino cherry on its top. I’m not ruling out a delicious september; I live for a late burst, but the fact is, the days are getting shorter and we need a last hurrah.

And I love what the maraschino cherry stands for – it implies a sort of perfection or ideal, where there might previously only have been wild squirty cream abandon. You can make whatever unseasonal, incoherent thing you like as long as you finish with one of these.

It’s an interesting time for ice cream sundaes, because we’re blessed with supermarket aisles full of salted caramel pecan pie ooey-gooey brownie doo-wop fandangos. But I think there is a specific kind of joy in thoughtfully assembling a truly delicious ice cream snack that you cannot achieve by hitting the icy bottom of a cardboard tub. so this week, I’m taking the ice cream right back to vanilla and dressing it up how I (not Ben or Jerry) see fit.

And I’m taking the aesthetic right back to the 1950s. This is a classic banana split other than the peanut buttery hot fudge sauce that smothers it (in the late 2010s, you don’t really see a banana without a nut butter, it’s just not done). Make this beautiful thing for your friends and be the one to put the maraschino cherries on their summers.