Sugar Shock: Pastry Pivot

Lokelani Alabanza, Hattie Jane’s Creamery’s ice cream whisperer, lost her job not long after COVID-19 arrived in Tennessee. “I remember it was March 18, the day after St. Patrick’s Day,” she tells the Scene.

Alabanza had been the executive pastry chef and culinary director at Hattie Jane’s since 2016, when the ice cream shop opened its first location in Columbia, Tenn. For four years, she developed literally hundreds of recipes — Strawberry Fennel, Butterscotch Oreo, Roasted Meyer Lemon and Chai Coconut Ash. (The last was a blacker-than-midnight scoop perfect for Halloween.)

Alabanza helped put Hattie Jane’s on the map by creating shocking yet somehow still tasty limited-run batches that highlighted the tastes of Tennessee. There was a Goo Goo Cluster ice cream laced with Jack Daniel’s; a Nashville Hot Chicken flavor made with a blend of garlic, bourbon, smoked paprika and cayenne; and even a creation called Puckett’s Barbecue, a vanilla ice cream swirled with the restaurant’s signature barbecue sauce and charred pineapple.

“That time was so weird and scary and uncertain for everyone,” Alabanza says about the early days of the now months-long pandemic. “A lot of people were losing their jobs.”

But it didn’t take long for her friends and family to rally around her. Now was the time, they said, for Alabanza to put into motion an idea she’d been harboring for years.

“You have to mourn the end of something, go through that emotional thing,” she says. “Then my parents were calling, my friends were texting, like, ‘This is it, you need to do this now!’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about? I don’t even want to leave the house!’ ”

For years Alabanza has wanted to create her own ice cream line, a brand of dairy-free ice cream that would combine the health benefits of cannabidiol with the nostalgia of ice cream. She was partly inspired by a friend who passed away from cancer, who, while sick, was able to ease some of her symptoms with CBD.

“I just knew, when I was permanently laid off, I didn’t want to stop making ice cream,” Alabanza says. “Humans love ice cream. So much. They love it! I kept thinking about when you have a disease and it’s affecting your body and you don’t want to be in pain. I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, what if someone could have something that was nostalgic, a flavor, and medicine was administered in that?’ That’s really where the thinking came from. I’m trying to bring nostalgia and comfort in the form of ice cream.”

I first tried Alabanza’s product, Saturated, at a bake sale benefiting the ACLU at East Nashville’s lou in June. Alabanza made a CBD-free Juneteenth flavor — a hibiscus, raspberry and lime sorbet that really was the best sorbet I ever recall eating. It was smooth — not at all icy like so many sorbets can be — and the bright berry punch of the raspberries slowly melted into the citrusy and floral blend of lime and hibiscus. Her Salted Watermelon (with 20 milligrams of CBD per serving) is another nice surprise. The saltiness isn’t at all pungent; instead it deepens the watermelon flavor, somehow making it even more intense and fruity than if you were to take a fresh bite of the melon’s red flesh.

Alabanza announces new flavors and pop-ups on her Saturated Instagram account, @saturatedicecream. Sometimes she’ll take orders for local deliveries, other times she makes custom flavors for special events. Her ice cream has also been available at Cafe Roze, Brightside Bakeshop, City House and Anzie Blue.

“The future’s e-commerce and distribution,” Alabanza says. “I want it to be distributed across America and show up in dispensaries and be in boutiques and local stores. That’s really the goal for Saturated, to get it out and have it available and to be a subscription-based business. That was always my goal.”

Mathew Rice was laid off in the spring, just a couple of months after COVID-19 first arrived stateside. He’d been the pastry chef at Pastaria since the restaurant opened in 2017; he moved to Nashville for the job.

Like Alabanza, it wasn’t until Rice lost his job that he really felt the urge to make a long-held idea a reality. The dream of opening a small cookie window, where people could walk up and buy a well-made and fun treat, had been spinning in his head for years.

“I was sitting at home, worrying, ‘What am I going to do if the restaurant closes or they can’t afford to have me back?’ ” Rice tells the Scene. “I began to think about my cookie idea, and thought I would just start out offering [cookies] through Instagram to see if people would be interested. And they were. It was really popular from the get-go.”

Rice named his cookie business Pink Door Cookies. For now, customers place their orders online and then visit his home — which really does have a pink door — to pick up their treats. But thanks in part to a successful Kickstarter campaign (more than $17,000 has been raised as of press time, with the Sept. 2 closing date still days away), Rice says he hopes to have Pink Door’s window up and running by early October. He’s already secured a space in Chestnut Hill’s BentoLiving Hotel.

“I’ve been almost as busy as I would have been with a full-time job just by doing cookies,” Rice says. “There was definitely a demand. Everybody was like, ‘Thanks so much for doing this, you don’t know how much it means, there’s nothing to look forward to right now and your cookies give us something to look forward to once a week.’ ”

Pink Door’s menu is full of both innovative creations and familiar flavors — there’s snickerdoodle, funfetti and a recently perfected chocolate-chip recipe about 10 years in the making. With other treats, Rice leans on his skills as a pastry chef to experiment. A lavender cookie gets its purple color from powdered dragon-fruit sugar, and an ’80s-inspired flavor pays homage to the decades-old rumor that Life cereal’s Mikey (“He likes it!”) died after eating Pop Rocks and drinking Coke at the same time. (Mikey, aka John Gilchrist, is alive and well.)

The snickerdoodle is a perfect example of Rice’s ability to both balance and enhance flavors. It’s dotted with cinnamon chips that melt into soft little pools of intense cinnamon flavor, giving the cookie a chocolate-chip-like texture. The outer coating comes from crumbs of Cinnamon Toast Crunch instead of the usual cinnamon-sugar mixture. The yuzu-flavored cookie, which is finished off with a stripe of sour-rainbow gummy tape, has an extra boost of something, too. Yes, there’s the citrusy flavor of yuzu, but there’s something else there too. I try to explain it on the phone to Rice: “It’s not lime, it’s not lemon, it’s … it’s —”

“Skittles extract,” he says. I nearly scream. Brilliant. It’s like a candy-flavored cookie without the squishy bits of Skittles getting weird in the oven.

“Cookies have always been my favorite thing to make,” says Rice. “I feel like they’re humble, but you can elevate them in really wild ways. Having been a pastry chef for almost 20 years at this point, I bring a lot to cookies that’s unexpected, and I’m incorporating the components and flavors of plated desserts but in cookie form.”

Keep an eye on @pinkdoorsweets on Instagram for menu updates and cookie window news.

It feels impossible to say this global disaster comes with a bright side, but thanks to Alabanza and Rice’s ability to pivot in the pastry world, at the very least we still have something sweet to help see us through.