Price scream! Selfridges launch £99 cone, the Billionaire’s Soft Serve

It's enough to melt your wallet. Londoners can now buy the nation’s “most expensive ice-cream” — for a cool £99 a cone.

The Billionaire’s Soft Serve, on sale at Selfridges, comes complete with a gold-leaf coated flake and spoon.

Each wafer cone — dipped in dark chocolate and coated in golden pearls — contains a dollop as big as your head and weighs in at 350g, about the same as an entire tub of shop-bought ice cream. Two hands are needed to hold it.

Experts from ice cream brand Snowflake began making the extravagant concoctions to order this week at the department store in Oxford Street.

They intersperse gelato with caramelised pecans and Belgian white chocolate truffles, and place a raspberry sorbet macaroon, fruit-filled pipettes and edible “diamonds” on top.

Sugar rush worth sharing

Watching the Billionaire Soft Serve being put together is genuinely exciting. It’s gold, shiny — and as big as my head.

It tastes good too. The salted caramel soft serve is silky smooth and light, and the mango sorbet underneath makes the perfect tart contrast.

Chef-innovator Silvia Gaetta spends an hour making the caramel alone, and said she was “very, very proud” of her creation.

I can imagine someone hiding a ring at the bottom of the mountain of ice cream and proposing — though it might go wrong if your intended stopped half way through.

Snowflake founder and chief executive Asad Khan said the ice cream was “not really for billionaires” but for “ordinary Londoners to share as a fun experience”.

I would say it is definitely worth paying for between a few people — I was on a sugar high after only a couple of spoonfuls.

Under the gold leaf the flake is still a normal Cadbury’s flake, as the wish was to “reference” the original 99 chocolate treat.

Selfridges claims the cone, “a take on the childish love of soft serve”, is the country’s most expensive. For aficionados looking for a more understated option — still with a hint of gold leaf — there are “gelato stix” on sale from £4.90 at the Snowflake stand.

However, the Billionaire’s Soft Serve is frozen out by the competition from America.

The Golden Opulence Sundae, sold at New York café Serendipity 3, is completely covered in gold leaf, delivered in a Baccarat crystal bowl goblet to take home, and needs to be ordered 48 hours in advance. It costs $1,000.

Previously Selfridges has offered customers what it claimed was Britain’s most expensive sandwich. The creation, launched in 2006, contained wagyu beef, foie gras and black truffle mayonnaise and cost £85.