Old-School Arctic Roll Ice Cream Cake Reappears In S’pore, Snapped Up By Nostalgic Netizens
The retro Brit dessert quietly disappeared from the market in 1997, but it has made a viral comeback.
Folks of a certain age would have heard of Arctic Roll, a well-loved British dessert that’s similar to a Swiss roll cake. Sold frozen in supermarkets, it consists of a vanilla ice cream filling wrapped in a layer of raspberry jam and sponge cake. For such a fancy-looking cake, it was also famously wallet-friendly, costing only around £1.99 (S$3.55) each.
The cake was purportedly created in the ’60s by Dr Ernest Velden, a Czech lawyer turned ice cream manufacturer. It enjoyed immense popularity in many countries - including Singapore - till the ’90s, when demand for the roll slowed so much that its Brit maker, BirdsEye, stopped producing it in 1997.