Culinary student loves chilling out at job with a lot of flavor

EDWARD C. FENNELL
The Post and Courier

Katie Grooms mixes ice cream for a customer at Marble Slab Creamery in Summerville.

Working at Marble Slab Creamery in Summerville is a "cool" job, Katie Grooms said, and not just because the freezers keep the place chilled on hot days.

Grooms, 18, who has been at the cake and ice-cream shop for a year and a half, loves her job because she gets to be creative with ice- cream flavors and cake decorating. "The best part," she said, "is I get to work with my best friend, and the boss is pretty cool, too."

Asked about any downsides to the job, she quickly replied, "There's not really a bad part."

The boss is Robert Harley, owner of Marble Slab Creamery outlets in Summerville and Mount Pleasant. He said Grooms must do a lot of production work while also serving customers, "kind of like on a stage."

"She's a jack-of-all-trades," Harley said of her skills.

The parlor, next to McAlister's Deli in the Azalea Square Shopping Center, makes its ice cream and cones fresh on-site. Grooms' duties include making the ice cream and cones, but her favorite is decorating cakes. She will enter Trident Technical College's culinary school in the fall, with a goal of becoming a cake decorator extraordinaire in the future.

"This job has given me the experience," she said.

Grooms said that when she first came to work, she was limited to making ice-cream cones. "That was kind of boring, but then I got promoted." Her new role gave her the chance to tap her creativity.

"It kind of challenges us whenever people ask us to be creative and step outside of the box of what we normally make," Grooms said.

Grooms said the parlor gets requests for unusual cake designs. She displayed a cake she made recently, topped by a huge 3-D ladybug illustration.

Among new flavors invented by Grooms is "coffee, marshmallow, fudge and graham cracker."

"I made it up on my own," she said. "It was just one of my creations. One customer who tried it said the only thing he didn't like about it was the marshmallows."

Once a customer asked for lemon custard, which she mixed, adding, "I'm not really into that."

Exotic ice creams start out as simple vanilla. Then fruit, berries, nuts and other ingredients are added to create a rainbow of styles and flavors, she said.

Before making ice cream, Grooms washes out the machine that mixes and chills it. She pours in a sweet cream formula from half-gallon packages.

"Put five and one-half gallons in, and it comes out with five gallons of ice cream," she explained. "It usually takes about seven minutes, but if you add stuff, it takes longer."

As a veteran employee, Grooms said she knows the ice-cream recipes by heart. "But even if I forget, I have the recipes right here," she said, referring to printed cards on a wall.

Reach Edward C. Fennell at efennell@postandcourier.com or 745-5865.