An Arctic roll is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 dessert

Dessert

In cultures around the world, dessert is a course that typically comes at the end of a meal, usually consisting of sweet food. The word comes from the French language as dessert and this from Old French desservir, "to clear the table" and "to serve." Common Western desserts include cakes, biscuits,...

 made of vanilla ice cream

Ice cream

Ice cream is a frozen dessert usually made from dairy products, such as milk and cream, and often combined with fruits or other ingredients and flavours. Most varieties contain sugar, although some are made with other sweeteners...

 wrapped in a thin layer of sponge cake

Sponge cake

Sponge cake is a cake based on flour , sugar, and eggs, sometimes leavened with baking powder which has a firm, yet well aerated structure, similar to a sea sponge. A sponge cake may be produced by either the batter method, or the foam method. Typicially the batter method in the U.S. is known as a...

 to form a roll, with a layer of raspberry flavoured sauce between the sponge and the ice cream. The dessert was invented in the 1950s by a Czech lawyer, Ernest Velden, who had emigrated to England in 1939. He set up a factory in Eastbourne

Eastbourne

Eastbourne is a large town and borough in East Sussex, on the south coast of England between Brighton and Hastings. The town is situated at the eastern end of the chalk South Downs alongside the high cliff at Beachy Head...

 producing Arctic Roll in 1958, and the dessert quickly became very popular. During the 1980s more than 25 miles of Birds Eye Arctic Roll were sold each month. However, sales slumped during the 1990s and eventually the manufacturer of Arctic Roll, Birds Eye

Birds Eye

__FORCETOC__Birds Eye is an international brand of frozen foods owned by Pinnacle Foods in North America and by private equity group Permira in Europe....

, stopped producing the dessert. The 2008 economic downturn saw the reappearance of Arctic Roll as consumers increasingly looked for low-cost foods.

While some consumers view the Arctic Roll as comfort food

Comfort food

Comfort food is food prepared traditionally that may have a nostalgic or sentimental appeal. Comfort foods may be foods that have a nostalgic element either to an individual or a specific culture...

, others view it as old fashioned and the food writer Nigel Slater

Nigel Slater

Nigel Slater is an English food writer, journalist and broadcaster. He has written a column for The Observer Magazine for over a decade and is the principal writer for the Observer Food Monthly supplement. Prior to this, Slater was food writer for Marie Claire for five years...

 has even described it as tasting of "frozen carpet". Nonetheless, Birds Eye reported "overwhelming consumer demand" for the dessert. Indeed, from when Birds Eye started marketing Arctic Rolls again in December 2008 until April 2009, sales of the product were estimated at £3.5 million, or 3 million boxes (around 250 miles of Arctic Roll). Commentators suggest that aside from Arctic Roll's low price, many consumers buy the dessert out of feelings of nostalgia

Nostalgia

The term nostalgia describes a yearning for the past, often in idealized form.The word is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of , meaning "returning home", a Homeric word, and , meaning "pain, ache"...

. A number of UK supermarkets sell their own brand versions of Arctic Roll, both chocolate and raspberry variants, and did so even when Birds Eye were not marketing the product.

Flavours

The original Arctic Roll features vanilla ice cream and raspberry jam; Birds Eye also produce a variant using chocolate ice cream.

Similar desserts

Americans

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 have similar desserts, sometimes called Icebox Cake

Icebox Cake

An icebox cake , zebra cake , or chocolate ripple cake/log is a dessert consisting of whipped cream and chocolate wafers. The back-of-the-box recipe on Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers indicates that the wafers are stacked to form a log with whipped cream cementing them together, and then the log...

, though the Arctic Roll name is not widely used. The ice cream may be replaced by whipped cream

Whipped cream

Whipped cream is cream that has been beaten by a mixer, whisk, or fork until it is light and fluffy. Whipped cream is often sweetened and sometimes flavored with vanilla, in which case it may be called Chantilly cream or crème Chantilly ....

. The name comes from that of another dessert, the Swiss roll

Swiss roll

A Swiss roll or jelly roll is a type of sponge cake roll. The thin cake is made of eggs, flour and sugar and baked in a very shallow rectangular baking tray, called a sheet pan. The cake is removed from the pan and spread with jam or buttercream, rolled up, and served in circular slices.The...

 (known in the United States as jelly roll.) Arctic Log refers to the same dessert dipped in chocolate

Chocolate

Chocolate is a raw or processed food produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. Cacao has been cultivated for at least three millennia in Mexico, Central and South America. Its earliest documented use is around 1100 BC...

.