The Beese Knees Takes the Cake

Just a hop, skip and a jump from Penn’s campus, hidden in what looks like a regular house on Spring Garden Street, there is a cooler-cart with a giant wheel, a man with a mustache, a woman in an adorable sundress dress, and a whole lot of ice cream.

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The Beese Knees ice cream cake company, founded in November 2014, serves up gourmet ice cream cakes in fantastical and crave-worthy flavor combinations for weddings and private events. Co-founders Kristina Beese and Tom Williamson came up with the idea in August of that year, when Kristina made Tom an ice-cream cake for his birthday.  The cake was a huge hit with their friends, and the two decided to make more and sell slices at Powelton Village’s Porch Sale.  From there, The Beese Knees took flight.

Beese and Williamson make scrumptious cakes at 9 inches in circumference, but it’s their decadent cupcakes that won us over. We were lucky enough to try three last weekend:

The Ed Rendell: Pretzel-infused ice cream, peanut butter ice cream, chocolate-pretzel crunchies, and Nutter Butter crust.

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Mustachio Pistachio: Pistachio ice cream, vanilla cardamom ice cream, chocolate pretzel crunchies and triple chocolate cookie crust.

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Affogato Your Sorrows: Hazelnut-chocolate ice cream, La Colombe-infused mocha ice cream, chocolate crunchies and chocolate cookie crust.

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Our favorite, predictably, was the Ed Rendell, with its irresistable sweet-salty combination of peanut butter, pretzels, and chocolate.

Of course, there are the kinks to work out. The cake to ice cream ratio is so unbalanced in favor of ice cream that we would hesitate to call this an ice cream cupcake. These handheld treats were more reminiscent of ice cream in a cup, solidly packed and decorated. Like the half-chocolate, half-vanilla snackers you begged for as a kid after softball games, approximately 20 years older and wiser, but still best eaten with a spoon.

Still, despite the mess we made of ourselves eating (read: slurping) these sticky treasures, they were undoubtedly satisfying in flavor. By the time one of us gets married, I’m sure the technicalities will be sorted out.

IMG_4986Text:  Byrne Fahey and Carolyn Grace

Photos:  Carolyn Grace

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