Shreveport’s Sweetport ice cream business adds a tea time

Since 2016, Nicole Spikes has been known for her creamy, delicious and handmade Sweetport ice cream, first sold from a truck known as “Sweetie” and more recently from her brick-and-mortar ‘scoop shop’ at 3301 Line Ave. in Shreveport.

Spikes has been making her ice cream — classic favorites like homemade vanilla or strawberry, and more unique options like Elvis Has Left the Building, a mashup of peanut butter and banana — for seven years now. She and her store have developed a loyal following of ice cream lovers who stop in to get a scoop of one or two of the 19 to 20 flavors she normally keeps in stock.

Ice cream is still the thing she wants to do. But not the only thing.

“I always want to try new things. Jeffrey (her husband, Jeff Spikes) will tell me, stop trying new things, but that’s the fun part of it,” she said. “I’ll see something on Instagram or Facebook, my feeds are totally food all the time.”

Spikes sees the things international bakers make that you can’t get locally.

“That’s why we started doing the Pavlova and the black and white cookies that you can find everywhere in New York, but you can’t find them here,” Spikes said. 

English friends got her thinking about something else, a traditional English Tea with sandwiches, scones, desserts, and, of course, tea. All very British, all steeped, like eponymous loose-leaf tea, in tradition.

“It’s always been in the back of my mind to try and one day, I just said, ‘I’m going to try to make clotted cream, I’m going to try to make scones that taste decent,'” Spikes said. “When I was able to do it, I was like ‘OK, we can do a tea service.'”

Visitors to her intimate English Teas that began in March are greeted with a tiered tray of handmade items. The bottom tier features an assortment of sandwiches which currently include a classic cucumber, an egg salad and a chicken salad sandwich.

On the second tier is where the culinary excitement really begins. This is the scone tier. Right now, she is hand making blueberry scones, which come with house-made lemon curd and clotted cream. 

Making clotted cream is a dedicated process that takes three days.

On the Monday or Tuesday of an English Tea weekend, she starts the clotted cream cooking.

“It’s a process of cooking for 12 hours, then you cool and refrigerate for 8 hours, and then scoop all the cream off the top,” Spikes explained. “It has to cool to room temp and then you refrigerate overnight and then can separate. Scoop it off.”

The consistency, she says, is similar to butter.

The third tier is mini desserts.

“I usually do a mini Pavlova meringue and fill them with lemon curd, whipped cream and top them with strawberries. Also a macaron,” she said. “I usually do a chocolate because there needs to be something chocolate.”

It can’t be a tea without tea. Spikes’ tea selection runs the gamut of the traditional English Breakfast and Earl Grey to a Black Bourbon flavor that she stocks for men who attend the teas.

“I’ve been surprised at how many men have come in for the tea and they didn’t look like they were under duress or anything,” she laughs.

The dress code is left up to the participants. She has seen families in shorts and T-shirts and groups in hats and gloves. Children are welcome if they can sit still long enough, she said. 

To date, Spikes has hosted roughly a dozen of the English teas, all sold out. She took some time off this summer, and is now ready to return to her teas, and to figure out how to not let her perfectionist side get the best of her.

“I want to make sure that everything is going OK. I haven’t quite figured out that perfect balance. I feel like I’m either bothering the customers or not around enough,” Spikes said. “One customer said, ‘Just have a flag on the table like Pancho’s.’ I’m not having a flag on the table at a tea, so I just end up walking by very slowly.” 

Spikes says she allots an hour and a half for the experience. Some customers finish in 30 minutes, and some linger for two hours. She is fine with either.

The next English Teas will be Aug. 17 and Aug. 24. She will post the dates soon on Sweetport’s Facebook page. 

Recently, a family who had been to formal English Teas in England and New York City told her hers was very comparable to the other far more expensive and fancy teas they had attended. For Spikes, the admitted perfectionist, that was enough. For now.