My husband, Sterling, hands a 2½-year-old grandchild at his knees a gingersnap loaded with a spoonful of orange sherbet. He’s forgotten that 2½-year-olds can’t manage the balancing act of eating melty substances on top of a cookie given to crumbling. Sterling is undeterred. This peculiar combination is his favorite summer dessert. I, however, know better, and reach for the cake cones. We’re the only 68-year-olds you know who always have wafer cones, or cake cones, in the cabinet.

Butter pecan. Cookie dough. Coffee. Nope, nope, and nope. Those are the flavors of winter ice creams. Waffle cones. Sugar cones. Pretzel cones. Nope, nope, and nope. For summertime, nothing else will work but sherbet — lime or orange — on a cake cone. Cake cones, crisp and crackling, light as air, papery as a wasp’s nest, are the perfect vessels for summertime sherbets, so prettily pastel, slightly grainy, with a citrus tang, closer to frozen water than frozen cream. You push that soft — softer than ice cream — sweetness down into the bottom as you go, a concave snowpack inside a saturated hollow growing limper with every lick, until, with only an inch to go, the whole construction has collapsed into gummable mush. Sugar cones do not mush. Plus, they leak.

photograph by Tim Robison

Summer frozen desserts, almost by definition, tend to be childlike. When my children were younger, they delighted in making a pie from blueberry or strawberry yogurt mixed with Cool Whip, dumped into a graham cracker crust, and frozen. They thrilled to having done it “all by myself,” and for those of you who require justification for dessert, the concoction carries some semblance, if paltry, to healthfulness. When I serve strawberry shortcake — not a strictly frozen dessert, but still, summery — to my family on vacation, I always put a big bowl of whipped cream right on the table so everyone can have as much as they want. Any psychiatrist will tell you that this is because, as a child, there was only ever a prissy dollop on mine when I longed for a snowy mountain of the stuff, obliterating the sponge cake and strawberries.

What looks as inviting inside a freezer as a rainbowed stack of rock-hard Chilly Willys? Pressed to a sweaty neck, or sucked dry, I’d eat one of those plastic, ruler-length sleeves if it was filled with windshield-washer fluid. The blue hue isn’t that far off. Truth: We were recently the only non-family adults invited to a wedding because the groom had never forgotten the popsicles I’d made from Kool-Aid that were always in our freezer in the summer months.

Frozen summer sweetness nearly always involves fruit. A frozen Key lime pie beats the regular custardy stuff by a mile. Alas, if you’ve ever accidentally put your watermelon too far back in the fridge, you already know that frozen watermelon is a pulped disaster, but we can all agree that watermelon chunks blended with crushed ice into a blurry pinky froth is sublime stuff, with or without a little lime, a little vodka.

photograph by ETORRES69/ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS

I guess someone somewhere eats frozen grapes and frozen bananas, but I don’t know them. But ice cream spread between brownies sliced horizontally and frozen? Now you’re talking. An icebox cake, created with ladyfingers and melted German chocolate folded into whipped cream? Heaven. Same goes for peaches pressed between cake layers and frosted with ice cream. Still, sherbet reigns supreme. I reckon sorbet will do in a pinch, and I’m not even sure what granita is, but it ain’t sherbet. As a grown-up, I prefer raspberry sherbet, that rosy-pink crystalline confection that leaves a tart sparkle on the tongue. Of late, though, raspberry sherbet has been hard to find without some stripe of pineapple. Pineapple. Psshht. If you need something a bit more sophisticated for a summer dessert, I recommend my mother-in-law’s lemon ice. Melt one gallon of vanilla ice cream; blend with 12 ounces of apricot marmalade and one can of frozen lemonade concentrate. Refreeze in a silver bowl and wait for the compliments.

Recently, the 2½-year-old was over for lunch. He finished his sandwich and asked for orange sherbet for dessert. My heart sank. Buddy, I said, I’m so sorry, but Daddio finished the last of the sherbet last night and I haven’t been to the store. He looked at the open cabinet and spied the ever-present box of cake cones beside the peanut butter. That’s fine, he allowed, unfazed. I’ll just have the plain cone, and contentedly crunched away at its empty, papery shell. He remembered.