Making artisan ice cream in a place like Monument is about elevating the whole community with happy tastes and a safe place to gather. From their inspiration in the Midwest to learning the ins and outs of setting up their own creamery, owner Shelley Sapp and her team at Lolley’s Ice Cream try to push the boundaries with scoops like new winter flavor Ginger Snapped while retaining stalwarts like Vanilla Bean and local favorite Graham Slam.
Sapp, her husband Dustin and their four kids moved from Indiana in 2016. She says, “We’re a huge ice cream family.” Shelley’s favorite flavor back in Indianapolis was a cinnamon ice cream called Cinnamon Graham Cracker. When the Sapps relocated to Colorado for the all-around cleaner air, she couldn’t find a similar flavor anywhere.
Motivation for a Difference Kind of Ice Cream
“So, my husband bought me a little quart and a half Cuisinart. And we’re like, ‘Let’s just try [to make] it ourselves.’” They started “messing” with ice cream flavors. “I mean we were pretty biased, but it was pretty good!”
Shelley says what initially motivated her in her ice cream making was that her husband and three of their four kids are gluten-free. “They can’t have normal ice cream. It’ll upset their tummies. And so, they hadn’t had, say, cookies and cream for years, for example. So, I’m like, ‘Well, if I can make this cinnamon ice cream, let me see if I can try to make the cookies and cream where you can’t tell it’s gluten-free.’” She says it took some time to perfect though.
Shelley initially had a degree in elementary education, “but I’ve been home with my kids for 18 years up until we launched Lolley’s.” She says she loves to cook and bake. “I think that this [Lolley’s] was like a challenge to me. Let’s see if I can figure it out.”
Before they started the business, Shelley and Dustin would invite friends to their house, taste the small batch flavors she was making, and ask their guests what they thought. “And they’re like, ‘Guys, this is really good!’”
The property they eventually purchased in downtown Monument for the site of Lolley’s is one they found on their Facebook feed. “We kind of married our ideas together. ‘Why don’t we see if we can do this, renovate it, make it a cute little shop that not only serves high-quality homemade from scratch ice cream but is also a good place for families and friends to come in and enjoy each other’s company?'”
100% Artisan
Shelley is proud that Lolley’s serves 100% artisan ice cream. “We pasteurize all of it. It is high-quality Colorado ingredients. It’s just so smooth and creamy and a little bit different from the other ice creams that we’ve tried around Monument.” Shelley loves the creative part of coming up with seasonal flavors.
She says there is so much more to ice cream creation than any of them had ever envisioned. Her husband even got a book called “The Science of Ice Cream.” She explains that the balance of the fat versus sugar content has to be perfect “or you end up with messes that you just have to throw away. Trust me, lots of our batches went straight into the trashcan before we got it right.”
When they first started churning batches in the industrial big batch turner after upgrading from their Cuisinart, “We literally made butter because we didn’t have our ratios [correct].” It took months, she says, to get it right. Now it has been almost exactly a year “since we got the vanilla bean just right.”
She says the vanilla bean is the base for most of their 12 base dairy flavors though she specifies that it is more the cream that it creates that is the underlying element that makes everything sing. ”So once we got the vanilla bean [down], then the caramel is a lot easier because you’re simply adding a caramel drizzle. A lot of our flavors are [basically] add-ins that we make on site.”
All Lolley’s add-ins to their ice creams are made from scratch and are all gluten-free. “We make homemade graham crackers, and we make chocolate graham crackers … and that’s what I use along with a white chocolate ganache for our cookies and cream.” For their strawberry flavor, they add strawberry jam. In total, they have three bases for their ice cream: the cream one, the cinnamon one [which is the base for their signature Graham Slam flavor) and chocolate.
Building the Signature Creations
Graham Slam is their signature … the cinnamon base ice cream that Shelley longed for when she moved from Indiana. “My second son, he’s 16 but he was 14 at the time, he named it Graham Slam, which I love.”
The chocolate flavor though she says was the last one they perfected and took the longest to get right. The chocolate itself they use is a real, high-quality fatty chocolate called Callebeut. The flavor itself is called Chocolate Decadence. They don’t do add-ins with this base, however. They keep it purely chocolate. “It’s the best chocolate ice cream I’ve ever had.”
Some of their signature creations are draws for locals and drive-in customers. The Witchever Sundae was a huge hit during the Halloween months where the customer could pick any of their 16 flavors with different sauces and toppings and capped it with an edible witch hat & broom. “What we try to do is appeal to not only the adults but specifically the kids. They would see that cute little witch hat with the little broom and were like, ‘We want one of those!’ But it was high quality too.”
Their next special creation is their Winter Sundae, which is going to implement a newly perfected flavor called “GingerSnapped” that is made with the same cinnamon base as Graham Slam. “I took all weekend a week or so ago trying to figure out a sugar cookie recipe and a gingerbread recipe that was gluten-free so that it works together and is delicious. And I don’t want it to just work. I want it to be tasty, and I don’t want anybody to realize that you’re eating gluten-free.”
“It took all week, and we had so many cookies, but we finally figured it out. So now we’ve got homemade gingerbread cookies in this Ginger Snapped ice cream, and it is so good. We’re also going to do a gingersnap sundae and put these darling little decorated gingerbread cookies in them. They’re just so cute. So, I’m hoping it’ll be as successful as the Witchever Sundae was!”
