When It Comes to Desserts, Columbia Keeps Up

Cupcakes, ice cream, ice cream sandwiches, shaved ice, cookies, cakes, pies, milkshakes, desserts, macarons — Columbia is a metropolis that loves its desserts, as evidenced by way of the vast wide variety of things to be had and locations to get them. And the town continues up with the times. When the cronut craze swept New York City in 2013, it wasn’t long before the croissant-doughnut fusion popped up inside the Soda City.
How does Columbia together stack up in terms of maintaining up with dessert tendencies, and what does their importance suggest to clients, cooks, and dessert creators throughout the Midlands? We requested several of them how Columbia got so sugary-sweet, and what the future would possibly maintain.
“The dessert scene has in reality gotten higher through the years,” says Jessica Kastner of Sweet Cream Co. “As the wide variety of local restaurants keep growing, so does the supply of precise and trendier dessert options.”
Her Main Street ice cream store surely fits into the particular category, with housemade ice cream flavors like honey sunflower with microgreens, and sea salt and black pepper with roasted strawberries. These thrilling flavors regularly net them high scores on national lists, together with their current list on Thrillist’s “18 Must-Try Restaurants in Columbia, SC”.
Charley Scruggs, the pastry chef at Terra, attributes the innovative nearby dessert alternatives to the humans making them.
“Right now it has to do with the talent and body of workers we’ve inside the metropolis; some eating places are lucky sufficient to have someone that cares, that is difficult to locate even in Charleston,” Scruggs says. “We have an ideal blend of devoted employees, and it’s been changing for an excellent route.”
Often, better stop chefs tend to consciousness on primary guides and savory fare, leaving the dessert direction to those with less ambition. But Scruggs has delivered his innovative cakes to several local nice-eating restaurants, from the bone marrow ice cream he served in a hollowed cow bone at Oak Table to the study in sugars this is his caramelized honey tart, a brand new addition to the Terra menu.
Besides the higher-quit eating places and famous bakeries like Silver Spoon, Ally & Eloise, and franchised locations like Duck Donuts or Baked Bear, desserts coming from Hispanic culture have their very own area in Columbia’s tremendous array of dessert alternatives. Panaderias (bakeries) and locations committed to shaved ice and agua frescas offer delicious cakes historically crafted to fight the heat — and are proving simply as necessary within the infamous summer season climate of South Carolina.
Manuel Vargas, one of the owners of Manny’s, a shaved ice and dessert store in West Columbia, sees the call for cakes firsthand. He and his mother and father commenced their business eight years in the past, beginning on their front porch. Their menu now not simplest has shaved ice with fresh fruit toppings, but also includes spicy chili powder, chamoy sauce, and combines bananas with ice and sweetened condensed milk with strawberries for an area of expertise icy deal with that can’t be determined simply everywhere. Vargas says he believes that Hispanic dessert shops want extra marketing to thrive.
Trends, especially food developments, can move at a very rapid pace, frequently becoming passé in large towns before they’ve even trickled down well to smaller towns and suburbs. But Erin Nobles of Silver Spoon Bake Shop doesn’t think that Columbia is ready for the outstanding-state-of-the-art simply but.
“I assume Columbia has a tremendous sort of alternatives presently and I am now not positive a notable-trendy business like an suitable for eating cookie dough bar could be capable of final in this smaller market,” Nobles says.
Nobles say that at Silver Spoon, she tries to curl nostalgic or comforting flavors and present them in new approaches, like banana pudding macarons or pepper jelly cream cheese croissants, and she reviews an extraordinary reaction from the one’s items.
And shifting away from remarkable sugary cakes is something that Scruggs hopes to see more of.