EN
Nederlands
FrançaisA Dame Blanche is vanilla ice cream with hot melted chocolate poured over it and whipped cream on top. It is the default dessert on almost every restaurant menu in Belgium and the Netherlands, and it is the safe order when nothing else on the card appeals.
You will recognise it as a close relative of the American ice cream sundae. The difference is the sauce: a Dame Blanche uses a thin, hot chocolate syrup that arrives in its own jug and gets poured at the table, not a thick fudge spooned on in the kitchen. Read on for the recipe and for what the name actually means.
About the Dame Blanche dessert
Dame blanche is French for “white lady”, and the dessert is named after an opera rather than a person. The name is usually traced to La Dame blanche, a comic opera by François-Adrien Boieldieu that opened in Paris in 1825 and was one of the most performed works of the century. Auguste Escoffier is credited with the first dessert of that name, though his version was nothing like this one: almond milk ice cream, poached peach, lemon sorbet and white currants. The vanilla-and-hot-chocolate version everyone means today is Belgian.
There is a second, older set of “white ladies” in folklore, the Witte Wieven in Dutch and the Weisse Frauen in German, wise women credited with healing powers. Nobody has shown a link between them and the dessert, so treat that story as a coincidence of names rather than an origin. If you want the visual explanation, white ice cream under a chocolate bonnet does the job.
The same dessert has a different name a border away. In Germany and Switzerland it is a Coupe Dänemark, Denmark cup, with the same three components. In Belgium and the Netherlands it stays a Dame Blanche, and what varies from kitchen to kitchen is the sauce, the topping and the glassware rather than the idea.
The chocolate sauce is the part worth getting right. Some recipes use cream, some water, some condensed milk. This one is a syrup: sugar and water brought to the boil, chocolate melted into it, a knob of cold butter stirred in off the heat. That is why it stays pourable and does not seize the moment it hits cold ice cream, which is exactly what a cream ganache does. It also means you can make it while the ice cream softens, in about five minutes.
The whipped cream is the counterweight. Cold, loose cream sits between the hot sauce and the cold ice cream and stops the whole thing turning into soup. The one twist here is vanilla sugar beaten into the cream, which lifts the aroma without making it sweeter in any way you would notice. Vanilla sugar is a cupboard staple in Belgium and the Netherlands and much harder to find elsewhere, so if your local shop does not stock it, vanilla sugar sachets keep for months in a drawer.
Presentation matters more than it should for something this simple. Tipped carelessly into a bowl it looks like a mess. Take a moment over it. Scoop a decent serving of ice cream into the bottom of a bowl or a tall glass, pour the warm chocolate over it, and finish with the vanilla cream. A maraschino cherry or a few flaked almonds are traditional garnishes, and nobody in Belgium will mind if you skip both.
Two easy swaps change the dessert without changing the method. Chocolate ice cream in place of vanilla gives you the darker version, and pistachio ice cream gives you a green one; the sauce and the cream stay the same. Find more Belgian recipes here, and our guide to Belgian sweet foods covers the waffles, speculoos and cuberdons that sit alongside this one on a Belgian menu.
Dame Blanche Recipe by Mom
This is the version my mother makes, and it is the everyday Belgian one: a four-ingredient sauce, cream with vanilla sugar in it, and good vanilla ice cream underneath. Buy better chocolate than you think you need, because with only four things in the sauce there is nothing to hide behind.
Ingredients
For 4 people
- Vanilla ice cream
- Chocolate (70% cocoa or more, depending on your preference)
- 100 ml water
- 100 g fine sugar
- 1 cube of cold butter
- 200 ml whipped cream
- 3 tbsp vanilla sugar
The chocolate is deliberately left to taste, because the amount decides the sauce. More chocolate gives a thicker, darker sauce that sets faster on the ice cream; less gives a thinner syrup that runs to the bottom of the glass. Start with a small bar, judge it in the pan, and add more if it looks too loose.
Method
The four steps are listed below, in order. Make the sauce first and take the ice cream out of the freezer while it heats, so both are ready at the same time.
- Make the syrup. Heat the water and sugar in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Break the chocolate into pieces and melt it into the sugar water over a low heat, stirring until you have a smooth paste with no grain in it.
- Finish the sauce. Turn off the heat and stir in a knob of cold butter. It goes glossy as the butter melts, and that shine is the sign it is done.
- Whip the cream. Mix the vanilla sugar into the cream and beat it to soft peaks. Do not beat it hard; you want it loose enough to fall off a spoon, not stiff enough to pipe.
- Build it. Put a few scoops of ice cream in a bowl or a tall glass, pour the hot chocolate sauce over the top, and finish with the vanilla cream.
Eat it straight away, before the sauce sets and before anyone takes it off you. And there is no shame at all in making this for yourself on a weekday afternoon. None whatsoever.
If you would rather have one made for you, Belgian cafés serve a Dame Blanche in every city on the map, and a chocolate workshop in Brussels will teach you more about the sauce than this page can. Tours and workshops are listed below, and hotel prices across the country are on Booking’s Belgium pages.
About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and this is a family recipe, cooked at home in Belgium rather than tested in a professional kitchen. The team covers Belgian food and travel for independent readers, including the recipes, chocolate workshops and city guides worth your time, and updates this page when a method or an ingredient needs correcting.
