Visiting Provo’s Sweet Cream Bar might be the 11th commandment
A specialty sundae is pictured Thursday, April 5, 2018, at The Sweet Cream Bar in Provo. Isaac Hale, Daily Herald
A specialty concrete is pictured Thursday, April 5, 2018, at The Sweet Cream Bar in Provo. Isaac Hale, Daily Herald
A specialty sundae is pictured Thursday, April 5, 2018, at The Sweet Cream Bar in Provo. Isaac Hale, Daily Herald
A specialty sundae is pictured Thursday, April 5, 2018, at The Sweet Cream Bar in Provo. Isaac Hale, Daily Herald
Provo has never had a shortage of ice cream.
It’s a cultural phenomenon many can’t explain. (Mormons like ice cream? Utah is a desert, that likes desserts? Or perhaps we’re just compensating for the lack of bars, and utilizing those unused calories to fill up on sugar?)
You’d think the fact we already have dozens of ice cream shops would make it more difficult to market another new ice cream store.
Wrong-o.
From the makers of delicious goodness at Rockwell’s Ice Cream Co., Sweet Cream Bar is dishing out a different form of ice cream — soft serve.
At a completely separate location in north Provo, Sweet Cream is taking soft serve to greater heights both literally and figuratively.
On this particular visit, we rounded up reporters and staffers working in the office one tiring afternoon for a group excursion to the new shop with the hopes of putting a little more pep in our step.
All I have to say, is that as a consumer you better be hungry and ambitious.
A staff member said at one point after receiving his ice cream order, “I’m ruining my dinner. … Well, this is my dinner.”
Sweet Cream Bar doesn’t skimp. If anything, you might be begging for less by the time you get to the bottom of your cone or cup because there’s just that much ice cream and toppings.
At first glance at Sweet Cream’s menu, it might take a moment to get oriented. We’ll help break it down for you. There are essentially four different ways you can get your ice cream: in a pastry Chimney Cone, a concrete, a sundae, or regular soft serve in a cone/cup.
The Chimney Cone is a fresh baked soft pastry cone coated in either cinnamon sugar, caramelized sugar, graham crumbs or chopped almonds. They’re monster cones; and that’s just the base. From there the creation includes spreads inside the pastry (peanut butter, biscoff, Nutella, buttercream frosting, huckleberry and strawberry), then a choice of Vanilla, Chocolate or Twist soft serve.
After that, they’re not done yet. You get to choose two included toppings/mix-ins or sauces from a well-crafted list. Some of the toppings are even homemade, like honeycomb candy, peanut butter cups or cinnamon-glazed pecans.
It’s a mouthful. A mountain of ice cream. Your own edible Matterhorn.
According to the extraordinarily helpful young man serving us that day, the Chimney Cone can weigh up to 1 pound with the whole concoction combined. Because of this, this menu item rings up as the most expensive, at $8. My recommendation would be to split it with someone if you’re not feeling greedy. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.
Several of us tried the Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, which I thought was fantastic. I paired that specifically with No-bake Peanut Butter Cookies for my second topping. The No-bakes had that homemade taste, making my ice cream combo a cookie-lover’s delight.
The toppings are almost artistically added onto cones, completely covering the ice cream in a feat against gravity. It’s impressive. Though, our one co-worker did leave a trail of Muddy Buddy’s behind him on the floor as he tried to eat them, slightly successfully, off the cone while on the way to our table.
The concrete is fairly typical, with Sweet Cream’s standard heaping portion even when ordering a regular size (about a pint of ice cream). Again, you can choose from the three soft serve flavors (but selecting Twist will essentially render your concrete Chocolate, anyway) and two mix-in toppings. We will mention our concretes melted more quickly than the other options, so eat swiftly!
The sundaes seemed to reflect a more normal portion size, and feature sauces like hot fudge, caramel and huckleberry made from scratch.
Sweet Cream also features three hard shell sauces, in addition to regular sundae sauces, with trendier flavors that remind me of grabbing an ice cream cone as a kid. Hard shell is uncommon to find these days and the nostalgia factor is indeed sweet.
Sweet Cream Bar
Where: 3376 N. University Ave., Provo
Hours: 4-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 4-11 p.m. Friday, Noon-11 p.m. Saturday
Cost: $2.50-$8