Kris Swanberg’s handcrafted ice cream company, Nice Cream, started with a wedding gift that turned into an obsession.
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She went even crazier with the attachment, using the basic KitchenAid recipe, which makes between two and four pints at a time. “The first flavor I tried was cookies and cream, and it wasn’t very good,” she recalls. “It was melty and icy at the same time.” Since Swanberg only had one CorningWare container (also a wedding gift) she had to pester Joe to eat her creations quickly so she could make more. She also gave ice cream to Cassie Green, the owner of Green Grocer in Noble Square, where she bought free-range eggs and other organic ingredients to make it.
Last summer a friend asked her to donate something for a bake sale to raise money for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. She contributed 25 pints of ice cream—honey vanilla with graham crackers, hot chocolate with roasted marshmallows, fresh strawberry with angel food cake—and they sold out at $6 a pint. “I told Cassie, and she said I had to start doing this for real,” Swanberg says. “So I thought, OK, then discovered it wasn’t so easy.”
This spring, for example, Earl Grey tea ice cream was studded with bits of shortbread cookies from Swim Cafe, and cream cheese ice cream featured carrot cake from Tipsycake. For summer’s fresh strawberry ice cream with angel food cake, she turned to Sweet Cakes Bakery, and vanilla bean ice cream with blueberry pie incorporates pie and extra crust from First Slice Pie Cafe. Swanberg steeps the vanilla beans in the half-and-half, then scrapes out the pulp and seeds and adds them back to the base. Once it cools overnight and is frozen in the ice cream maker, she swirls in (by hand) the filling from the pies, half of which has been pureed, and little pieces of crust. She estimates that she uses three pies and several sheets of extra crust for 50 pints of ice cream, her typical batch size nowadays.
