I showed Progress how to bake brownies today. Actually, it sort of started out as a lesson in brownie baking, segued into a lecture on the history of the ice cream sandwich in American food culture, and finished with a demonstration in how to overbeat egg whites (believe it or not, that last one was on purpose. Best way to know what overbeating looks like is to do it). But Progress is a patient and curious guy, who rolled with the culinary punches. He’s never done pastry work before, but I’m feeling really confident that he will take on this new challenge with his usual grace and skill. That man seems to excel at everything, from cleaning to churning to fixing things to serving customers to laughing at my unfunny jokes (namely at Marianne’s expense). We’re lucky to have him with us at Creamery HQ.
But back to brownies. These particular brownies are exciting not only because they are going to be crumbled into a chocolate ice cream to make chocolate brownie chunk ice cream, for our first-ever Ice Cream Club collection, but also because they are the beginning of a new stage in our production. Although we will always be trying out new recipes and tweaking our ice creams, we now have enough flavours in production that we can now focus on a very interesting sideline I like to call mix-ins. Mix-ins are delicious goodies that are swirled, crushed and tumbled into ice cream when it comes out of the churn. International ice cream brands like Ben ‘n Jerry’s have transformed mix-ins to an art form, and we’re definitely inspired by their creativity. Chunks of cheesecake? Mint patties? Cookie Dough? Caramel swirl? The list of possibilities is endless. And since a big part of what we do is making everything from scratch, we will be making our mix ins from scratch, too.
So Progress and I have our work cut out for us. And we can’t wait to get going.
