Make Merry at Home
When Marlene Haley was first learning to make ice cream, she’d have to pull the stove out of the wall to plug in the machine. She cooked countless bases in her kitchen, experimenting and tweaking recipes.
A decade later, you’ll find her serving up creative custard-based flavours from her small fleet of roving ice cream trucks and her bricks-and-mortar operation, The Merry Dairy.
Now, she’s sharing the joy of ice cream-making through her new cookbook, Great Scoops: Recipes from a Neighborhood Ice Cream Shop.
“Ice cream is daunting for a lot of people,” Haley says. “I just wanted to be able to break that down, so that you can do it at home.”
The idea to create a recipe book first came from Amelia Ryan, The Merry Dairy’s creative director. Ryan’s been developing recipes at the scoop shop since it opened its doors on Fairmont Avenue in 2017.
“She just walked up with a resume and said, ‘Are you hiring?’ And I said, ‘As a matter of fact, yes, we need an ice cream-maker,’” Haley recalls.
Together, the pair turned a little notebook full of ideas into a how-to resource complete with 80 ice cream and dessert recipes.
“We really, especially in [the] front [section] of the book, try to walk people through every single step. But we also say the why — why each step is important,” Ryan says.
So, what are the most important tips to keep in mind when you’re getting started? Haley and Ryan agree: keep it cool, have patience and, most importantly, have fun.
Whether you’ve got a small ice cream machine or just a bowl with some ice and rock salt, Great Scoops includes everything you need to know to start making custard-style ice creams at home. If you’re feeling like it’s not quite right, check the “Trouble Scooping” section to figure out what went wrong.
Haley and Ryan worked hard to find the balance between technical tips and tasty treats. Categorized by season, Great Scoops will teach you the basics along with a flavour wheel to help you create your own adventure, stunning photography by Christian Lalonde and fan-favourite recipes from the shop as well as some brand new ones.
All the recipes are nut and sesame free, with vegan and gluten- free options as well. Accommodating dietary restrictions has always been important to Haley, whose son has a peanut allergy. She wants the whole family to be able to find something they can enjoy — even if they can’t all agree on their favourite flavour.
“We really want ice cream to be for everyone. It's the ice cream for all experience,” Haley says.
When they started testing out recipes to include, Haley says the freezer was “like a science cupboard” filled with containers of sample batches labelled with green tape and the date it was made.
“All the staff would come in and then there'd be notes written in whiteboard marker on the freezer being like, ‘This one's a winner!’” Ryan adds. “We gave so many of our friends and family recipes to test. We wanted them tested in home kitchens.”
In addition to all the ice creams, you’ll also find recipes for cookies, pie dough, waffles and more, so you can make inclusions, sauces and sides that will take your treats to the next level. After all, what is Limoncello Blackberry Biscotti ice cream without the biscotti? (Hint: Probably still a delicious ice cream, if you want to try it that way.)
While many recipes came from The Merry Dairy team, others were inspired by customer requests.
“People ask all the time for certain flavours and then we whip it up, and all of a sudden, we can't take it off the menu,” Ryan says.
If you’re craving Ryan and Haley’s frozen custard, however, you’ll still have to make the trip to visit The Merry Dairy in person. It’s an important distinction; even though the ice creams in the book are custard-based, they’re different from the frozen custard the shop is known for.
“We thought, ‘Should we include a vanilla frozen custard recipe?’ But, it wouldn't be the same because the truck, and in the shop, that's a very industrial machine,” Haley explains. “It's a bigger type of machine that gives it [the custard] that fresh, silky smooth texture.”
When they were narrowing down the recipe list, it was important to them to include community suggestions, such as Tiger Tail, an orange-flavoured ice cream with swirls of black licorice.
“It is for the community. And that's why we called it, Recipes from a Neighborhood Ice Cream Shop,” Haley says.
The Merry Dairy trucks, which used to go out to all corners of Ottawa for catering and special events, have been parked for almost two years because of the pandemic. At the shop, Haley and Ryan have been serving from their takeout window, but they’re both excited to welcome customers back inside and get the trucks rolling again.
Thinking back to 2012, Haley says she never imagined the Merry Dairy would become what it is today. At the time, her ice cream dreams were solely focused on her truck.
“When I first started driving the truck around, I was just excited to drive all around the city. I went to soccer matches in Vanier, a wedding in Orleans, out to Kanata, but I never imagined having a brick and mortar,” she says.
“And then, even when I got this building, I was thinking it'll be a nice home base for catering and for doing events with trucks because we love the trucks. That completely changed. Once we got the shop and customers came in, then, it was like, ‘This is an ice cream shop.’”
For the last two years, scoops have been served from the takeout window and the trucks have been parked because of the pandemic. Needless to say, Haley and Ryan are excited to welcome customers back inside and get the trucks rolling again.
“We're just looking forward to going back to being a scoop shop where you can come in and you're pointing at all the flavours and sampling flavours. We haven't done that in a long time.”
If you can’t make it to the teal-coloured storefront, don't worry. Great Scoops can help transport you there. As Ryan says, “It captures the cheerfulness of The Merry Dairy.”
Great Scoops is available for purchase across North America from Indigo, Amazon and several local bookshops.
The Merry Dairy
102 Fairmont Ave., Ottawa, Ont.
themerrydairy.com | 613.680.3144 | @themerrydairy
