Freeni: Hey listeners this is Freeni Aragones here to talk about an amazing ice cream booze infusing company called Tipsy Scoop, who share some of their recipes through ice cream classes. I got the opportunity to speak to Abby Lavin, the Director of Operation for the company, by making a trip to their production facility in Harlem. It was a bit difficult finding it but well worth the trip. The classes are held in their production facility as well where you will hear some of the employees, trains because its New York City of course, and most importantly get an Introduction to Abby, Tipsy Scoop, and their incredible Instragram page which everyone should check out.
Freeni: You guys have a page that people want to be a part of, everyone wants ice-cream one of the most popular desserts ever, everyone wants to mix booze, if you can put booze into something people are going to be there. Over 21. You guys have crazy decorations, when you guys put all these things together, how does it feel to come up with the final piece when you see everybody be happy, maybe after a class or something, how does that feel?
Abby: It’s amazing! It’s always the best feelings to make your customers happy and excited, we love what we do, and we get so excited to share what we do with others and make them happy. Melissa Tavs in the owner and founder of Tipsy Scoop, She’s the creative director, she thinks of all the recipes and decorations, she’s a genius. Does such a great job putting things together, there’s a lot that goes on behind closed doors, as every small business has, but we work really really hard to make sure our customers are satisfied with our product and our Instagram is sort of a story of what we do.
Freeni: How many tipsy scoops are there?
Abby: We have two retail locations in New York City, we have our production facility in Harlem, where we are now. We have our co-packer who produces a large quantity of our ice-cream in Brooklyn, and then we are in wholesale nationwide, we also ship nationwide.
Freeni: Their Instragram page might inspire soon to be ice cream makers and could create a world where ice cream machines become just as popular as a coffee makers and toasters. For now, we get a close look into how Abby used to implement her ice cream skills at home, making you considering buying an ice cream machine for yourself.
Freeni: The average person doesn’t know how to make ice-cream, this is actually why I’m coming here, I’m a huge fan of ice-cream, it’s one of my guilty pleasures, because I have ice cream way too often. For someone who knows how to make ice cream, how often do you make it at home and what is your favorite ice cream combination to make?
Abby: Good question, so actually I’m actually a classically trained French pastry chef, so I have been making ice-cream for over a decade. I used to make it at home before I went to pastry school and when I was in high school, I would have fun with a small ice cream machine at home. But now that I have access to a commercial grade ice-cream machine here, I don’t make ice-cream at home as much anymore, I do eat a lot of ice-cream at home. For the average person trying to make ice cream, there are lots of great books out there, to find recipes to find out how to make your standard ice-cream. As well as some really fabulous ice-cream machines out there, you just mix it and you pour it in, press on and start and its ready to go in 10-15 minutes. But in class you really get to see how to make boozy ice-cream because the ratios are different, obviously alcohol doesn’t freeze, so you wouldn’t add too much alcohol, and then if there’s not enough alcohol then what’s the point?
Abby: Alright so now we’re going to do our ice-cream, which is Santa’s cookies and whiskey, This is the first special class doing this flavor. This is one of our most popular holiday flavors. It’s based on the story with Santa eating cookies with milk.
Freeni: Besides ice-cream what’s your favorite thing to do? That you could put alcohol in.
Abby: Well chocolates are a great example; you could put old fashioned types of cholates like rum balls. They don’t bake off so you can get the alcohol in there. A lot of baked goods though, bake. So you bake off alcohol and it doesn’t have the alcohol content. With ice-cream you don’t bake it off, so it actually stays in and we have a 5% alcohol. It doesn’t disintegrates, doesn’t evaporates.
Freeni: Honestly just let me know what’s the craziest story you’ve ever experienced working and teaching classes?
Abby: The craziest story teaching classes… obviously when you have retail stores crazy things always happen. In our classes which for the most part are pretty well maintained, and we have really lovely students who get along with each other and it’s a professional-happy environment. Once we were doing a corporate class with a corporate company, there was you know coworkers there and I guess they had a corporate happy hour before they got here. They brought along their own alcohol as well, so by the time they got here they were pretty tipsy. So they were not interested in the class. We no longer allow BYOB in our classes, but we do provide tastings of the alcohol we put in the ice-cream while you’re making it, so it doesn’t get as out of control anymore.
Freeni: Remember that important detail, you don’t pre-game for Tipsy Scoop, Tipsy Scoop is the pre-game. They create a great environment for a corporate team, dates, family outings, whatever the case is, you’ll leave with a bunch of ice cream and ready to enjoy the rest of the night.
Freeni: So when it comes to bake off and bake on, is this anything that people can find online and what would you recommend if someone wanted to do it too.
Abby: It’s a really good question, there are more desserts made of alcohol now than there were 5 years ago even. For an example a very popular bakery on the west side, prohibition bakery, their known for boozy desserts, they have a cookbook, so you could find their cookbook. You just have to go online and read the recipes, teach yourself you know, bake it, see how it tastes and that’s the best way to learn. Thank you! That was so fun.
Freeni: After speaking with Abby, I checked Prohibition Bakery’s book on amazon and a bunch of recipes are available inside of it if anyone wants to give it a try. Other booze infused books and foods pop up as well. Making ice cream and baked desserts can be time consuming but spending the day in an ice cream making class opens the door to plenty of possible booze infused options that might encourage us to learn ourselves. Thank You to Abby Lavin, Melissa Tavs, and the whole Tipsy Scoop team. With Baruch Blogs this is Freeni Aragones.