Describe your dream ice cream
Answers
I actually have a very special story behind my love for this ice cream flavor - one that I’m not sure my sweet husband Daniel Quatro was aware of when he suggested I answer this! Here’s the tale of how my love for Piece of Cakeunfolded:
Once upon a time, not too terribly long ago, a little girl was growing up in rural Western New York. Sometimes she got to take a short drive to a tiny village some 25 miles outside of Buffalo - where, under skies scented by the smell of bubble gum, a magical manufacturing plant churned out thousands of half-gallon cartons of ice cream.
(Yes, scented like bubble gum. The whole town sometimes smells like it thanks to the gumball plant!)
You see, my Dad is a controls engineer, and at that time it was his responsibility to ensure that cartons of delicious creamy goodness navigated the twists and turns of conveyor belts inside Perry’s facility without any casualties. A giant window - just outside of his office - allowed visitors to look over a busy production floor. Shining silver pipes brought in cream on one side, and filled half gallons slipped down a maze of lines before vanishing into the blast freezer.
On many weekends, my Dad would need to work. His job involved things that could often only be done when nothing was running. And on a number of occasions that meant a little girl in a hair net and lab coat got to tag along into some amazing places! Other times, we’d just get to walk up to the viewing deck, munch on ice cream bars, or hang out in the lunch room.
One day, a more official tour took us up to the product development office.
There, on trays, were tiny cups. And in those cups were scoops of a flavor not yet released to the public.
It looked a little odd. Very yellow ice cream. Very dark swirls of chocolate. And what were those chunks?
I took a bite.
And my childhood favorite of cookie dough ice cream crumbled into ashy bland dust.
This was flavor. This was my dream in an ice cream!
Chunks of pound cake. Oceans of yellow cake flavored ice cream. Swirls of rich chocolate.
It was simple, rich, and perfection itself.
Piece of Cake wandered into our home quite a bit after that. Ice cream products that got rejected landed in a giant freezer for employees to take home and share! Sometimes it meant a dented carton. Far more often, it meant the beginning or end of a run, or a test run. Too many peanut butter cups? Reject! Not enough cookie dough? Banished! I’m guessing Piece of Cake had some issues, because I know we enjoyed a lot of it. My Dad also knew it was my favorite and I’m sure he kept an eye open for me!
And that is the story of how I met Perry’s Piece of Cake before most of the population did. It was love at first taste.
Its wonderful taste was simply an echo of the wonderful people who made it. From Brian Perry on down, I never met someone there I didn’t like. Ice cream was their life, and who can’t have fun making ice cream?
My Dad moved on to automation controls for cardboard boxes after Perry’s changed plant managers. Now we got rejected imperfectly-cut cardboard boxes for every purpose imaginable.
It wasn’t quite as cool.
But those beautiful days when ice cream was something we had to be limited to one giant bowl of a day, and purchasing it was unheard of - the days when a sweet receptionist would page my Dad as soon as she saw my Mom and us kids arrive - and the grand adventures inside a friendly, small-town, incredibly high-quality ice cream plant - those will live on in my heart forever.
Perry’s Ice Cream, I love you!