Kolaches & Ice Cream: Our Two Favorite Things

Kolaches and ice cream are my two favorite things. Since the day we opened Lick, I've wanted to figure out how to capture the flavor of my favorite cream cheese kolaches from my hometown, Hallettsville, TX, and so (drum roll, please....) I'm thrilled to announce that we finally did it! Our newest flavor, Cream Cheese Kolache, is here, y'all!

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with kolaches: these filled, yeasted pastries were brought to Central Texas by Czech immigrants in the mid-1800s and are as prevalent and loved as donuts in certain parts of our state. My hometown, Hallettsville, TX, identifies so closely with the kolache that it has its own Kolache Festival in September every year. For the festival, there's a kolache queen who rules over the festival and remains queen for a year, there's a parade, polka music, kolache-making demos, and a kolache eating contest! It's amazing in a very small-town-Texas kind of way.

Although I never made them myself growing up, I ate them all the time -- at church on Sundays, at birthday parties, baby showers, you name it. I remember biking as a kid to get some of my own from the local bakery, Kountry Bakery, that's been around since 1979. Theirs are what I think of when I think of kolaches, and they're what served as the inspiration for our kolache ice cream.

Kolaches come in all flavors but the originals are filled with things that grow here in Texas and are often seasonal. The top flavors are cream cheese, cottage cheese, strawberry (available in spring), prune, poppy seed, dewberry (available in summer), pecan. My forever and always favorite is cream cheese, and though Chad would bust on me for only ever eating cream cheese kolaches, he's come around to thinking that it's also his favorite. So, for our newest ice cream flavor, we stuck with our mutual favorite and aimed to capture the taste of the trusty Cream Cheese Kolache!

This flavor is special to me because it's about not only the Czech culture and how it contributed to Texas, but also my own community. I loved every part of the process in developing this flavor from bringing the Kountry Bakery's kolaches to the kitchen for the team to try to sharing an old Hallettsville cookbook with our Director of Production and Kitchen Manager that my mom had given to me. They had never made kolaches before 2 months ago and I really think that they nailed it. It's like there's a piece of my childhood and heritage in every bite!