Greetings, and welcome to another season of great ice cream from your friends over at Mad Maggie's Homemade Ice Cream!

We officially opened the windows for the season on Saturday, April 1st, but since the weather was so warm on Friday afternoon, we actually had quite a few people come to the window on Friday, and we were happy to serve them.

We've met a lot of wonderful people in our first three seasons, and we saw quite a few of them over the weekend. It's a great part of the business to get to meet people and develop friendships with some of the faces we see at the windows.

We have about 34 flavors of ice cream in the dipping cases right now, and I'm furiously working the batch freezer to try to get the rest of our regulars in stock. People at the window have been clamoring for slushes and sherbets, so I'll make an effort to at least have a couple of flavors of each "real soon now".

Spring Cleaning

Every spring it seems to take more and more time to get our little stand in order. The flower shop uses our space to store floral arrangements during the offseason, and I always seem to spend days cleaning all of the plant dust out of every nook and cranny of the store.

I spent quite a few nights at the store stripping the floors, and layering on 6 coats of wax to try to get our floor looking at least presentable for the start of the year.

Our "grass plot" is looking terrible, as the grass there takes a pounding during the summer, and this winter was harsh on it as well. The landlords placed some large boulders around the edges, which should hopefully provide a few more seating areas for folks to use while eating their ice creams. We're not sure what to do about the grass area, we've considered just spreading mulch, as there's not a lot of hope for grass seed to take root with all of the foot traffic on it.

Mini Golf

If you haven't seen it yet, the folks next door to us at the BFM driving range ripped up the tired, old miniature golf course last fall, and replaced it with a new, sexy course.

The new course has much nicer obstacles, and an interesting collection of animals spread around the course. Best of all, there's a jungle stream running down the center, and up near the street, a pool with gushing fountains shooting into the air.

Hopefully, these improvements will attract more visitors to their course, and we'll see some increased traffic as well. If you're looking for a fun thing to do with your kids/spouse/friends/etc., come on by and give the course a try!

Keeping Promises

It seems like no one keeps their promises anymore:

• Our sign lights were wiped out by the snowplow this winter, and our electrician promised to have them working again by April 1st.
• We purchased a new awning, and the awning company promised to have the new awning installed by April 1st.
• We purchased a new soft serve machine, and the servicing company promised to come to hook it up by April 1st.

Maybe it was all a big April Fools joke, but our old awning is a mess, we have no street sign lights, and our new soft serve machine sits unused in the corner of the store. We're muddling by without these, but the place sure looks a little seedy with our flapping awning and our temporary flood lights in place. Hopefully, these little problems will all be resolved over the next week or so, so bear with us!

[Late Update] The day after I wrote the above paragraph, the service company for our soft serve machine called, and I left to meet them at the store. When I got there, our awning company was there removing the old awning, although they claimed it'll take until sometime next week for them to get the new awning ready. The soft serve machine worked -- for about two hours, then it went down again!

T-Shirts

Last year, we went back and forth on T-shirt designs for so long that we never did end up getting any printed. I had pretty much left the task of getting something designed and printed to Maggie, mainly because she spent so much time the previous year complaining about the look of the shirts. And it ended up like everything I leave to her: it didn't get done.

(She doesn't read these newsletters, so I'm pretty comfortable saying that without knowing that I'll be sleeping on the couch for the next few nights.)

This year, I decided "enough is enough", so I asked a friend at my work to come up with a little design that we could put on our shirts. Here's what he came up with:

Then I stopped at a shirt store, and picked a few colors, and had them digitize the logo so that they could be embroidered. We should have the shirts in the store sometime around April 15th. I'm sure Maggie will still find something to complain about with them, but at least we'll have shirts this year!

Winter Work

One of my scoop staff was extremely proud of her accomplishments when I asked her what she had been doing to keep busy all winter. "I finished an entire jigsaw puzzle!" she boasted.

"Just one puzzle?", I asked her, "and that took you the whole winter?"

"Well", she replied, "I did it much faster than most people -- it said on the side of the box 'two to four years' and it only took me a couple of months!"

Yep, she's one of my blondes...

Flavor News

One of my winter goals was to improve the quality of our sorbets. To that end, I was at the University of Wisconsin for a couple of days in March to attend an "Advanced Batch Freezer" course. I came away from it with a new $200 refractometer, which accurately measures the sugar content in fruits, a bunch of handy, dandy mathematical formulas to help calculate sugar puree percentages, and a pretty good understanding of how sugars and stabilizers do their job to help keep sorbets sweet and "scoopable", so that they both taste great and have a good "mouth feel".

Hopefully, my newly acquired knowledge will be evident this year in the quality of our sorbets. I made a very nice Canteloupe Sorbet to start the year, and I just picked up some nice looking Blackberries at the store, so I'll be trying a Blackberry Sorbet sometime this week.

Over the winter, I made a very nice Mimosa Sorbet, and I think I'll try another batch of this soon this season. As the other fruits become available throughout the season, I'll try to do a sorbet with each.

Do me a favor? If you get fresh fruit from the supermarket, and come across some that have spectacular flavor, send me an email and let me know where you got them and what variety they are? Some of the fruits (like peaches) are great for a week or two, but outside of that time, are a little punky tasting. If you come across something that's really flavorful, let me know and I'll buy some to make fresh sorbet.

Thanks!

Other new flavors:

• We've always made our Mint Cookie using real Girl Scout "Thin Mint" cookies (at least, while we have them -- we normally run out around July and switch to using Keebler's "Grasshoppers".) This year, I have 6 cases stashed away, which will hopefully last us until the fall.
  
  This year, I decided to try using Girl Scout "Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies", so we have a couple of tubs of our trial flavor of that in the dipping cabinets now. It's a peanut butter based ice cream, with crushed cookies mixed in. I think it still needs "something" to spice it up a bit, but it's still very good. Ask for a taste the next time you're at the store!
• One of the first postings to the new "guest book" feature on our website asked us to try making a Butterscotch Granola flavor. That sounded pretty good to me, so I gave it a shot. I used a butterscotch flavoring (of course...) and mixed in some honey almond granola clusters. I still think this needs more granola, but again, it's a nice taste. Give it a try and let me know what you think it needs!

Staff Profile

This month's staff profile is someone who I featured in one of last year's newsletters as well, but there's big news from her in the offseason, so she is our first "repeat performer" here.

Katie is one of our "North Reading Kids" and one of our team leaders. She's one of the kids who's surprised me the most, as when we hired her two years ago, I wasn't sure if she'd be able to handle the job. She's impressed me at every chance though, and is now the model that I hold up to the newer kids: "Just watch Katie, and do whatever she does, and you'll be all right."

Katie is also a member of the North Reading Cheerleading squad. Over the winter, her team came in first in the regional cheerleading competition, and won the rights to travel to Orlando in February to compete in the national competition.

We were happy to hear that the North Reading team did the town proud by winning their division! Hard to believe that a national champion comes from my little hometown of North Reading, huh?

Great job Katie, we're all proud of you!

Newsletter Coupon

Let's start the season off right with a good coupon! Bring a copy of this newsletter to the store, and we'll give you a "BOGO" offer -- "Buy one, Get One" on any item. Buy a small sundae, and we'll give you a second item free.

Obviously, the lower priced item is the free one, don't try to confuse any of my blondes by asking them if you can pay for the jimmies and get the ice cream for free!

That's about it for this edition. Sorry that I didn't get this out before our opening -- I feel badly that I neglected to notify our loyal newsletter readers of our opening first!