Nanaimo: Waterfront Confections

With J away for a week in her home town, I had to find another temporary partner in crime for the sampling of ice cream. Luckily, I was able to convince my friend K that what we really needed after a day at school was some ice cream. And since the weather was nice, we decided to go down to the downtown waterfront promenade (boardwalk?) just past Maffeo Sutton Park to sample some ice cream from Waterfront Confections.

 This little shop is both an ice cream and a candy store. They have an excellent selection of modern and nostalgic sweets, including a good variety of imported licorice treats. K is a real candy connoisseur, so I'm sure he will be back at some point to check out the candy again, but for now we came for ice cream.

Although there are three shops on the promenade that serve ice cream, Waterfront Confections is the only one that makes its own ice cream on site (the others scoop brands like Island Farms that can be found at the grocery store). They had an interesting selection of flavours including the standard chocolate and vanilla, to tiger (my sister's favourite regardless of maker) and white chocolate-raspberry.

No matter how many times I rotate and save this image, it is still upside down...

But you get the idea.

 K opted for a triple scoop in a waffle cone. He chose white chocolate-raspberry, black cherry, and bubblegum. When asked why he chose those flavours, he said that he enjoys eating food that does not look natural in colour, and in that regard I think he made a good choice.

According the K, all three had a nice flavour. He appreciated that the bubblegum did not have pieces of gum in it, as usually when ice cream manufacturers opt to do this, the gum is of poor quality, and it's hard to chew gum and eat ice cream at the same time. The black cherry ice cream had a good quality of fruit in it, and the white chocolate-raspberry was probably more white chocolate than raspberry but captured both flavours well enough.

For my cone I chose to go with wild blackberry sorbet and seaside caramel.

Blackberries grow like weeds around here, so being able to find local wild blackberries should be relatively easy, even if it might be a pain to find enough to make this flavour regularly. The taste of it reminded me of a light blackberry jam flavour that wasn't too sweet or too tart. I chose seaside caramel, because since we were right by the water, I thought it would be appropriate to select one of their ice creams named with a nautical theme. (I believe one of the others was chocolate barnacle swirl, or something to that effect...obviously containing no real barnacles) Seaside caramel was a very buttery caramel taste and though I'm not sure it combined well with the blackberry sorbet, it was still very nice. I would buy both flavours again.

In conclusion, if you're looking for some ice cream and a nice stroll by the docks, skip the other places on the promenade and go to Waterfront Confections, where you can get home-made ice cream to top off your trip to the seaside.