Bompas & Parr announces competition to create 3D ice cream moulds for London Design Festival

In a world of near-constant flux and unpredictability, it is important to remind ourselves from time to time of elemental truths which will retain their factuality for time immemorial: Nighty Night is a good sitcom, sunny weather makes everything nicer, and ice cream is brilliant.

While we’re not sure if food art fanatics Bompass & Parr enjoy Julia Davis’ pitch-black BBC2 masterpiece quite as much as we do, we are able to confirm that they’ve announced a design competition to create three-dimensional ice cream moulds for London Design Festival.

Tied in with the British Museum of Food’s tasty looking
Scoop: A Wonderful Ice Cream World exhibition currently running till the end of September at Kings Cross’ Gasholders space, all entries must be sent to Bompas & Parr by midday on Monday 27 August. The winners will be announced on Thursday 30 August.

The judges’ three favourite designs will be turned into ice cream moulds and will be on sale at Scoop during the London Design Festival for one day only on Thursday 20 September.

The duo are hoping that designers, artists, and architects will find themselves whipped up into a frenzy by the prospect of “creating shape and form that’s fit for 21st Century snacking and displaying on contemporary dining tables.”

Yes – there are, it seems – jazzier ways to present a few scoops of a raspberry ripple than stuffing them deep into the crevices of a crinkly cone that you’ve found sat at the back of a cupboard. In fact, at a banquet hosted by the Austrian ambassador to Rome in honour of Empress Elisabetta Cristina in 1714, diners were treated to the eye-popping sight of towering pyramids of moulded sorbets, a large vase made of milk-coloured ice and a tree holding 150 frozen moulded fruit sorbets set in a chocolate “soil”.

Convincing your local ice cream van driver to fit all that in alongside the screwballs, Zzaps, and those weird feet-shaped creamy lollies you don’t see so much these days might, admittedly, be a slightly tall order. But where’s the harm in trying?

Those of you with a predilection for a bowl or six of gelato can download the competition brief here.