Category: Food

Ice cream sandwiches for all

Sweet Bel’s Ice Cream has Happy Cake too

Jennifer Belmore was making a Happy Cake Bowl.

“I make cake pretty much every day here,” Belmore said, as she cut a slab of chocolate sheet cake from a baking pan and cut it into cubes. “Right now I have chocolate cake and funfetti to put at the bottom of a bowl. and then you get to pick your ice cream. You get to pick a hot topping and then it’s covered in whipped cream and sprinkles and a cherry. It’s a hybrid sundae per se — kind of like a throwback to your younger days when you were a birthday boy or girl and you had your cake and ice cream. We got away from it for some reason. And who doesn’t love cake and ice cream?”

Belmore opened Sweet Bel’s Ice Cream & Dessert Creations in Merrimack in April,

“I opened April 18. And business has been good so far,” she said. Her vision is to serve ice cream with a different spin on things. “My background is in baking,” she said. “I was trained as a French pastry chef, and I’ve always wanted to have a bakery. And so, fast-forward all these years later, and I have the attitude of, ‘What goes better with baked goods than ice cream?”

Belmore bought an existing ice cream shop on Daniel Webster Highway in Merrimack. “It already had the right footprint,” she said, “and I just had to add an oven, and voila! Here I am.”

At this point, Belmore put cubes of chocolate cake in the bottom of a bowl, setting several off to the side, and scooped ice cream on top of the bowl-cake. At any given time Sweet Bel’s offers more than 30 choices of ice cream.

“Our ice cream comes from Shain’s of Maine, up in Sanford, Maine,” she said, “a small little place.” This time Belmore chose banana ice cream to go over the cake cubes. Given the choice of chocolate, marshmallow, caramel, peanut butter or strawberry sauces, she chose peanut butter to go over the two scoops of ice cream.

“This is probably one of the best combinations,” Belmore said with a nod. “This and our peanut butter cup sundae; everyone loves peanut butter and chocolate.” She said she really likes making Happy Cake Bowls. “There’s something very satisfying about them,” she said. “My favorite ice cream probably changes by the week, but right now, it’s Turtles — vanilla [ice cream] with chocolate chips, cashews, and swirled with caramel. It’s so good; I like the texture. And then chocolate peanut butter is probably my second favorite.”

Scooped ice cream and sundae’s make up a large part of Belmore’s sales, she said, but her particular specialty is custom ice cream sandwiches.

“We do custom ice cream sandwiches,” she said. “I bake cookies every day and then you can pick your cookie, your ice cream.” Baking two types of cookies per day means that a customer might have more than 60 different ice cream sandwich combinations to choose from.

Belmore covered the sundae in the Happy Cake Bowl with whipped cream, then crumbled the remaining cake over the top. She examined the bowl carefully, then added a cherry, and sprinkles, then nodded again.

Sweet Bel’s Ice Cream & Dessert Creations
Where: 608 DW Highway, Merrimack, 670-2161, sweetbels.com
When: open seven days a week during the summer, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Featured photo: Happy Cake Bowl from Sweet Bel’s Ice Cream. Photo by John Fladd.

Now with gelato

A changing of the guard at the Bakeshop on Kelley Street

After more than 15 years, Denise Nickerson, the owner of The Bakeshop on Kelley Street in Manchester has sold her business and retired. The Bakeshop’s final day of business was June 26. The good news is that a new food business is set to take over the space at 171 Kelley St. within the week.

Karsyn’s Gelato and Bakeshop plan to open Wednesday, July 8. Owner Brooke Viviers said that while the focus of the new shop will be in a slightly different direction, fans of the Bakeshop on Kelley Street’s baked goods will not be left hungry.

“My plans are to keep a lot of Denise’s baked goods,” she said, “but gelato is going to be our main seller. So we’re going to have gelato. We plan to make gelato cakes, sundaes, and we’re also thinking about serving smoothie bowls as well. I’ve talked with Denise about what her best sellers are and what people constantly come in here for. I want to try to keep that here so we’re not taking everything away that Denise does, but changing it up a bit.”

Gelato is a lot like ice cream, Viviers said — a sort of close Italian cousin to it.

“Gelato is prepared a little bit differently,” she said. “It actually has a much lower sugar content. but it’s made with milk instead of cream, so you think maybe it won’t be as creamy as ice cream because there’s less fat, but it’s very creamy and it’s softer; it’s kept at a higher temperature so it’s not as hard as regular ice cream.”

Viviers’ plan is to carry a large variety of gelato.

“We’re going to have 18 flavors to start,” she said. “We’ll have more than 18 flavors available from where we get the gelato from, but we’re going to rotate and see what sells the best. When we have a good idea of what [our customers] like the best, we’ll have some flavors that will probably always stay and then we’ll rotate some as well.”

Gelato is a family business for Viviers.

“My family has been in the bakery — and now gelato — business for the past eight years now,” she said. “My brother [Zack Smith] started selling gelato in his bakery [in Methuen, Mass.] three or four years ago, and since then, he’s acquired a couple more locations where he’s trying to do more gelato and not as many baked goods, and kind of steering more toward the frozen side of things. He built a relationship with the owner of [gelato maker] Dolce Freddo, and asked if he could sell it at his bakery, and that’s kind of how it happened. I moved to Manchester when I was dating my husband. We’re now married, but we have a home in Manchester, in the North End area, and I’ve been here for about six years now.”

Viviers said the gelato flavors at Karsyn’s [named after her new son] will be familiar to her customers.

“We’ll have a lot of standard flavors,” she said, “like chocolate, vanilla, we have a Nutella, Reese’s, and a cannoli flavor. We plan to do like a special cannoli sundae, cannoli ice cream cakes, that kind of thing. With mascarpone. We’ll keep Denise’s recipe, for cannoli filling, so it’ll be like, we’ll still sell cannolis like Denise does here, but we’re going to make cakes and sundaes out of it.”

“That said, we have an amazing pistachio gelato,” she said. “And maybe rum-raisin.”

Karsyn’s Gelato and Bakeshop
Where: 171 Kelley St., Manchester
When: Starting Wednesday, July 8, open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Featured photo: Denise Nickerson, owner of The Bakeshop on Kelley Street, demonstrates her style of cake decorating to Brooke Viviers, the owner of Karsyn’s Gelato and Bakeshop, which will open in the same space at 171 Kelley St. in Manchester on Wednesday, July 8.

The Weekly Dish 26/7/02

• A new farmers market: According to a recent press release by Hampton’s Lane Memorial Library, there is a new farmers market in Hampton. “The Hampton Farmers Market is a new market in Hampton, NH with a mission to provide a community space for local farms and artisans to vend their products,” the announcement read. For its initial season, the market will run from July 11 to Aug. 8. All market dates are on Saturdays, from 2 to 5 p.m. at 19 Academy Ave, near the library. The market will be held rain or shine. Visit hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton-farmers-market.

• Making batch cocktails: Tuscan Market (Tuscan Village, 9 Via Toscana, Salem, 912-5467, tuscanbrands.com) will host a class from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 2, teaching the art of making batch cocktails designed for summer parties and backyard barbecue. In this interactive class, guests will learn how to craft three crowd-friendly cocktails that are easy to prep ahead of time and serve in large batches. Afterward enjoy fireworks on the Tuscan Market Lawn. The cost is $64.74 through the Tuscan Brands website.

• BVI terrace party: The Bedford Village Inn (2 Olde Bedford Way, Bedford, 472-2001, bedfordvillageinn.com) will host a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary with an evening of festivities on its Fondi Terrace Thursday, July 2, from 5 to 9 p.m. There will be a live grill station serving a special outdoor menu featuring sausage and peppers (served on a fresh roll or paired with pasta), a variety of grilled skewers, pasta salad and more. There will also be a festive spritz bar. No tickets are required to attend, but registering for the event will help guests save the event to their calendar. Guests are welcome to stop by throughout the evening and enjoy the festivities.

• New brew: Shoreline Vodka Lemonade is now on draft at 603 Brewery & Beer Hall 42 Main St. in Derry, according to a brewery newsletter. 603’s hard lemonade has an alcohol by volume of 5 percent, the newsletter said. The newsletter also announced 603’s New England Strawberry Wheat, a beer with a 5.2 percent ABV. 603 will head to Meredith on Thursday, July 23, to celebrate National Lemonade day: “Join us at Town Docks … from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., where we will be sampling our collaboration with the Common Man, Big Lake Vodka Lemonade! … enjoy live music, swag giveaways, product samples, and of course the usual great food and drink offerings from Town Docks!” the newsletter said. See 603brewery.com.

Rose & Rhubarb

Last Thursday was one of those days. You know the ones — you don’t really have anything to complain about, but you get on a mental hamster wheel and before you know it you find yourself scowling at the world, drenched in self-pity.

Fortunately, there is a solution for self-pity: rhubarb.

Even more fortunately, we are right in the middle of rhubarb season. As it turns out, aside from pie, rhubarb is a rockstar ingredient in cocktails. It is sweet and sour (well, OK, mostly sour, but it will be sweet by the time we’re done with it) and princess pink.

A rhubarb margarita, you ask? Yes, please.

Oh, you meant a rhubarb sidecar? Even better.

We’ll do something with gin this time (see below), but first we need to make some rhubarb syrup.

Rhubarb Syrup

  • 1 pound or so of cleaned rhubarb stalks, chopped to half-inch dice. (The actual amount doesn’t matter too much, so long as you use an equal amount of sugar.)
  • 1 pound or so of granulated sugar – the same amount as the rhubarb, by weight.
  • Zest and juice of 1 lemon

Freeze the chopped rhubarb for several hours or overnight. This will form ice crystals that will poke holes in the rhubarb’s cell walls, releasing rhubarb juice more freely once we start cooking.

Later, combine the frozen rhubarb, lemon zest, and the sugar in a saucepan, and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until you get a sort of rhubarb compote swimming in juice, and the juice comes to a boil. Stir in the lemon juice, then take it off the heat and set it aside for an hour or so to sort of collapse in on itself.

Strain through a fine-mesh strainer. Eat the rhubarb compote over ice cream or on a buttered crumpet, and use the pink syrup for cocktails.

Just such a cocktail – Rose & Rhubarb

  • 2 ounces botanical gin – At the moment, I’m enjoying Hendrick’s Oasium very much
  • 1 ounce fresh-squeezed lemon juice
  • 3/4 ounce rhubarb syrup (see above)
  • 5 drops rose water – You might want to work your way up to five drops. Rose water can be tricky stuff. One drop too little, and you can’t really taste it, and one drop too much, whatever you’re making ends up tasting like grandmother soap. I had to throw away a perfectly good pear crumble once because I wasn’t paying attention and added a little too much rose water, and it ended up tasting like a rear-view mirror air freshener.
  • 2 to 3 ounces plain seltzer

Combine the gin, lemon juice, rhubarb syrup and rose water with ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake thoroughly, and strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Top with club soda and stir gently.

Sit somewhere with a gentle breeze and listen to a mostly forgotten song from your youth as you sip this — anything from Meat Loaf’s 1977 album Bat Out of Hell will serve this purpose very well. (Though, admittedly, that’s from my youth). As promised, this pretty, pink drink is sweet and sour and a little floral.

After two of them, you probably won’t take yourself quite so seriously.

Featured photo: Rose & Rhubarb. Photo by John Fladd.

Berry nice

An afternoon of strawberries and sousaphones

“In 1943, a boys’ band from Nashua came out to Hollis and gave a concert, and a lot of the parents and the kids were very enthusiastic and wanted to do a band of their own because at that time there was not music in the public school,” said David Bailey, conductor of the Hollis Town Band. “1946 was the first mention of the Strawberry Festival, and it was put on to help raise money for what was at that time called the Hollis Church School Band.”

Since then, Bailey said, the Band, eventually in partnership with Hollis Woman’s Club and the Hollis Congregational Church, has raised money every year by inviting the public to listen to the Band perform and eat strawberries. This year’s Festival will take place Sunday, June 28, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Hollis Town Commons.

“There will be strawberries and shortcake,” Bailey said. “There will be hand-whipped cream. There will be ice cream and people can have strawberry shortcake with whipped cream or strawberry shortcake with ice cream or even just strawberries in a bowl.” The point, he said, is to support the Hollis Town Band, while eating the strawberries.

Bailey said this event has its roots in Hollis’s history as a farming community.

“It’s a great throwback to old-fashioned small-town agricultural New England,” he said, “when people would get together and pause because being farmers would be from sunup to sundown and even later, seven-days-a-week kind of job. And so they would take like one afternoon out of a busy season. At this point in the year, the crops are in the ground. They’ve been planted. Strawberries are an early crop, so that’s one of the reasons why we can have the festival now. But they could take an afternoon off and not put themselves back time-wise because of not working for the day. This is a lot like that, and when the weather’s nice — my fingers are crossed — we get between 1,000 and 2,000 people coming to listen and enjoy the desserts.”

The Festival is also a reminder of what an important institution the Band is to the local community.

“We have about 65 members,” Bailey said. “And while the band is called the Hollis Town Band, the members come from around 20 different towns in this surrounding area and we rehearse once a week in Hollis. I’m in my 41st year as the conductor of the band. It’s really close to my heart.”

The Hollis Strawberry Festival and Band Concert
Where: Hollis Town Common (3 Monument Square, Hollis) or at Middle School in case of bad weather.
When: Sunday, June 28, from 2 to 4 p.m.
Admission: The concert, which will feature patriotic and popular instrumental music, is free. The money raised will come from the purchase of strawberry desserts.farm-a-q.

Featured photo: Photo from cultivatenewengland.com/farm-a-q.

Farm-A-Q

Coming together for a celebration of local food

Evan Mallett is the chef and owner of Black Trumpet in Portsmouth. He is passionate about food and where it comes from. Twenty-five years ago, he struggled with a dilemma.

“We were doing these dinners called the Barn Dinner once a year in a very old barn in Stratham, New Hampshire,” Mallett said, “and each chef contributed a different course. And each of the ingredients that we used were heirloom varieties that were commercially extinct and had a story to tell. We had done the Barn Dinner for a few years, and it became clear that that was a very exclusive event that only a certain privileged population could attend. And we wanted farmers at the table. We wanted everyone in our community at the table.”

Which is how the first Farm-A-Q happened.

“It was a group of chefs, farmers, gardeners, and people interested in galvanizing our local food community,” Mallett said. “We did this outdoor festival and added music. And each of the chefs who had done a course at the Barn Dinner now had a table outside and were cooking outdoors. There was a big fire pit, and everyone sort of gathered around that and cooked overnight. So that tradition has stayed alive now for I think it’s been 15 years.”

This year’s Farm-A-Q will take place Sunday, June 28, at Tuckaway Farm in Lee. Sarah Cox is an owner of Tuckaway Farm. She said the event is a way to look at area food through several different lenses.

“The Farm-A-Q is an event that has really grown into a way for the community to come together and celebrate and learn about local farms, local chefs, and also more education on agriculture. It’s an inclusive kind of family-friendly event and features local chefs using local food as a way to bring the community together.”

Cox said anyone attending Farm-A-Q will have a chance to explore any number of food interests.

“They will come up onto one of our big farm fields,” she said, “and with one ticket, they’re going to have access to different chefs set up around the field. They can come and sample food and talk to those chefs. And there are tables where they could meet some of the farmers. There are tables with kids’ activities around food and farming. Kids can get their passes to go check things off all around the event as they’re tasting things. We have agricultural organizations like the Conservation District who come and they show some of the ways that they help support area agriculture. But for the most part, a family coming or a person coming just comes informally with a lawn chair or a blanket, and they can set up for the afternoon, walk around, get some food, and just enjoy themselves. It’s meant to be informal, but a way to really connect with [New Hampshire] food and get to know what’s around us, get to know maybe the chefs of places you’ve wanted to go or have been or introduce people to them; to connect how they work with farms and meet some of the farmers who are growing that food.”

Evan Mallett described the dish that he and his restaurant will serve at Farm-A-Q: “Black Trumpet is teaming up with a woman named Dina Wilford, and she is the owner of Vita Tortilla, which makes its tortillas from a masa that is in turn made from the corn grown on the farm where we are. So we are going to be cooking grass-fed beef shanks in a smoker and then braising them and then serving them barbacoa style with her tortillas.”

The Hollis Strawberry Festival and Band Concert
Where: Hollis Town Common (3 Monument Square, Hollis) or at Middle School in case of bad weather.
When: Sunday, June 28, from 2 to 4 p.m.
Admission: The concert, which will feature patriotic and popular instrumental music, is free. The money raised will come from the purchase of strawberry desserts.farm-a-q.

Featured photo: Photo from cultivatenewengland.com/farm-a-q.

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