Cool cones complement creative ice cream
Tasty discovery: Blue mint ice cream on a chocolate habanero cone.
Price: $ 3.95 single dip, $5.95 double dip.
Destination: Cone Slingers,15141Carrollton Blvd. in Isle of Wight County, just across the James River Bridge.
Hours: Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, open noon to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, noon to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. The shop closes an hour earlier the rest of the year.
More info: 757-745-8040 or Cone Slingers on Facebook.
A cone is not just a conical piece of dough that saves you from holding a scoop of ice cream in the palm of your hand.
At least it doesn’t have to be.
That’s one of the philosophies of Cone Slingers, an ice cream parlor that opened in Carrollton last summer, where every day begins with the task of making a huge batch of waffle cones with distinctive flavors.
What are the flavors? Depends on the day. On the day I stopped by, the features included chocolate habanero and maple bacon. Cone Slingers offers the standard sugar cone as well, but the goal is to be as creative with the specialty cones as they are with the ice cream.
And the ice cream? At any given time, the parlor offers about three dozen flavors, all homemade, and changing so frequently that the menu is actually a grid of notecards on the wall that can be easily swapped out when one flavor runs out and a new one comes in.
Customers know to check the Facebook page, which is updated regularly with the latest concoctions.
“I like to be creative,” owner Reeva Luecke said. “I like banana ice cream, but I don’t want to eat the same banana ice cream all the time. So we might have a bananas Foster ice cream, and when that runs out, maybe we replace it with banana pie ice cream. We’re always trying something new.”
Luecke also operates O’Doodledoo’s Donuts less than 3 miles up the road in Suffolk. She brings the same philosophy to each place — always have the basics (glazed and jelly, chocolate and vanilla) but also make every day different by trying new flavors, new combinations, new concepts.
If matcha green tea ice cream isn’t a hit, try mixing in different fruits.
If tropical wasabi ice cream doesn’t fly off the shelf, know that people are at least trying the free samples. And when you get a hit — like the cowboy cookie ice cream — you can hang on to the recipe for future use.
“Every day is trial and error when you do homemade,” she said.
With both the ice cream and the specialty cones, Luecke will start with a simple recipe and begin experimenting, looking for the right amount of each ingredient to get the flavor profile she is seeking.
There are always at least a couple of flavors made with coconut milk for customers who are vegan or lactose intolerant, as well as glutenfree varieties.
It falls to each customer to decide which type of cone properly complements a particular ice cream flavor. My habanero cone was a nice counterpoint to the cool flavor of the blue mint ice cream — and I could still taste the cone10 minutes after the last bite.
“You see ice cream shops like this in places like New York or out in California,” Luecke said. “But we can have it here, too, in Carrollton. There’s no reason we can’t.”
— Mike Holtzclaw