comes from sunny Aussie TV chef Bill Granger, and just involves cream and dark chocolate. Nigel Slater and Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham also use just chocolate in their sauces, but Alice Hart, David Lebovitz and ice-cream experts Caroline and Robin Weir add cocoa as well. As I discovered when making brownies , cocoa powder gives an intense chocolate flavour without adding any extra weight, but I find it a little too powerful here. Unlike most dark chocolates, cocoa powder is unsweetened, which means adding sugar, and the bittersweet result is a little more sophisticated than I want from my chocolate sauce. That said, once it's poured over ice cream, Alice Hart's recipe, from her book Friends at My Table , is rather good in a grown-up kind of a way. One day, perhaps I'll graduate to that. Interestingly, no one ever seems to make chocolate sauce with milk chocolate, presumably because it's just too sweet to go well with ice cream. The body: sticky v unctuous Alice Hart recipe chocolate sauce. Photograph: Felicity Cloake Chocolate sauces seem to divide into two equally tempting camps of gooey goodness. There's the sticky syrup, the kind of thing you might hope to find drizzled over your Dame Blanche in a Belgian cafe (continental European establishments seem to recognise the primacy of the sundae as a mid-afternoon food group, while we Brits offer only cakes and scones, to my great regret), and then there's the unctuous variety, made with cream, and good enough