Variegato Drops Karkadeh Flavoured Soft Serve Ice-Cream This Ramadan

My dearest foodies, this is your good friend and field researcher Fatafeet El-Share’ reporting to you once again about a new concoction infiltrating the Cairo foodie scene - Karkadeh ice-cream (and scream I did in the middle of the ice-cream parlour).

It was a day like any other. After a many hours of pitch stockpiling at work that led me to leave the office post-Maghrib and a slightly teary drive home (NGL, your girl has been going through it), I thought it was only fair to stop by my favourite artisanal ice-cream parlour, Variegato. Daydreaming about the familiar embrace of trusty cookies and cream, the sight of a seasonal Ramadan menu stopped me dead in my tracks. Karkadeh, Tamarind and Date Pudding ice cream flavours? I quickly alternate routes from familiar to entirely novel.

With blind trust in the unwavering quality and unfailing good taste of Variegato’s colder creams, I jumped for the Karkade-Tamarind swirl with no expectations in mind (not if I tried). A last-minute call at the cashier (thanks, mum) resulted in a rushed purchase of what would become the star of one of the top 10 sweetest moments of my life: ice-cream-filled Lotus basbousa.

Some may think it was stupid to jump so far into the tub of unknown ice-cream, but I knew what I was doing (lie). Besides having an absolutely fantastic trip (pun intended) home, ice-cream cone in hand, my family went absolutely sugar-crazy for the basbousa concoction. Masterfully filled with qeshta ice-cream (yes, that’s a thing – ethereal as it may be) and covered in a thick layer of Lotus, the dessert seems to take the form of a cotton candy cloud that carried my entire family away into a land where no table-wiping and too-late-suhoor fights exist. I promised to get them their fix next week.

Very full and eternally grateful,

Fatafeet El-Share’