There is always a moment during the most-sweltering day of the summer when every person wonders if he or she would be better off packing it up and heading to the North Pole. Most people live in a place where it gets brutally hot, even if only for a single day. This is why almost every culture in the world has its own version of ice cream to keep people cool when the temp outside becomes unbearable — and, yes, that does include the people in the Arctic Circle. Even they will break a sweat sometimes.

Mochi is a thick, chewy Japanese cake that is believed to be at least 2,000 years old. Made of little more than pounded glutinous rice, it was referred to as "Food for the Gods" and thought to symbolize a long life. The idea of wrapping it around ice cream came in the early 1990s courtesy of Frances Hashimoto, owner of Los Angeles Japanese-American confectionary Mikawaya. She was inspired by a traditional Japanese treat called daifuku (translation: "great luck"), in which a small piece of mochi is flattened, stuffed with a sweet filling, then rolled into a ball. Hashimoto knew the odds of American audiences going gaga over red bean paste weren't good, but what about using chocolate ice cream, fusing daifuku with ice cream sandwiches? It became an immediate hit, and it soon made its way back to Japan, where it's become one of the country's most-popular desserts.

"Dondurma" is Turkish for "freezing," and you can find this sweet treat in Azerbaijan, parts of Greece and other parts of the Middle East where sweltering heat is more common than not. Sweet and creamy like American ice cream, dondurma has a thicker, almost chewy texture. While certainly a pleasant texture, this is more for function than flavor: By adding salep, the powdered root of a Turkish orchard, and mastic, a thick tree resin, the ice cream melts a bit more slowly, which is very important in 100-plus-degree temperatures.

Everyone loves when ice cream finds a way to get even more playful, and Germany might have taken the (frozen) cake. Since the 1960s, German ice cream parlors have been pressing vanilla ice cream through spatzle presses to make long spaghetti-esque "noodles," then topping them with sweet strawberry "sauce" and shaved white chocolate "cheese."