![]() ![]() When I finished the licorice ice cream and it was in the container, I put the container inside a ziplock bag. I must be guilty of spoiling him too because I made vanilla ice cream too. When he was young his sister would dress him before waking him up so his mother wouldn’t yell at him for missing breakfast (again). He was the baby of the family and spoiled from the day he was born. “Will you make me some vanilla or chocolate? I don’t think I can eat black ice cream and I’m not fond of licorice.” ![]() He wrinkled up his nose as if to ask, “Do you HAVE to?” I’d get a cone of licorice ice cream and my dad would roll his eyes and say, “Anyone that would eat that would eat shit off a rusty spoon, Maureen.” He also said ‘jumpin judas on a rock’ when he got really angry too.Ī few weeks ago I was reminiscing about my childhood and told John I wanted to make some licorice ice cream – for old time’s sake. My father was a dedicated strawberry ice cream man. It was the sort of ice cream that turned your tongue black so you couldn’t pretend you hadn’t eaten any and if you spilled any on your white uniform – busted! It didn’t wash off very easily. Rummel’s also had licorice ice cream and it was my all-time favorite. “I’d like two lobstah rolls ta go,” didn’t sound odd way back then. I scooped ice cream, made sodas and sundaes and worked the snack bar where we served lobster rolls, hamburgers and deep fried hotdogs. When I worked there, the Rummel family lived in the house. It’s been sold to Gifford’s now but the building is the same. When I was 16 I got a part-time job across the river in Waterville at Rummel’s Ice Cream in the summer. The word good has two syllables and the iconic word that suits just about any occasion for a Mainer is “ayuh.” “It was so fricken cold, even the lobstahs were wearin mittns.” Mainers hang aht on their walls, walk down the road apiece, stand in the doah yahd, eat wicked good chowdah, put their buhdados down cellah and describe things in a cute way. They have different words for common things. During the worst of the drought we could have walked across the Murray River. John said he’d never seen so much water in a river before. We lived along the Murray River in Australia – one of Australia’s biggest river systems and there in Maine we were walking along the banks of the mighty Kennebec River in Winslow. The contrast between where I lived and where I was from was striking. ![]() The first time my Aussie husband visited Maine, we’d just come from our home in Victoria in southern Australia where we’d been in drought for about 7 years and he said, “Sure is green!” Everything in our world was brown and here was this mass of green as far as he could see (he had his head glued to the window of the plane). You have to be tough to get up and go to work when the temperature is 25 below, snow’s five feet deep and the wind is blowing a gale. Making about 10,000 whoopie pies a day and shipping them to our retail store in Freeport, many distributors, and customers all over the US.I’m from Maine – a rugged sort of place that requires its citizens to be tough. More than 25 years later, we have a dedicated team of bakers that make a variety of flavors in our bakery in Gardiner, Maine. They called them Wicked (a Mainer term for something great)! What better name for them, Wicked Whoopie Pies. My whoopie pies were legendary within my circle of friends and family. Since I loved baking, and still do today, I decided to give it a try in my small home kitchen. Making a living baking whoopie pies?! It sounded crazy at first, but I could not imagine doing anything else. ![]()
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