The Pastry Project’s ‘Soft Serve Summer’ Returns to Pioneer Square

The Pastry Project will open its soft serve window for a second summer on June 3, kicking off the season with free mini sandcastle ice cream sandwiches for the first 100 visitors. From June through September, the soft serve window at 165 South Main Street will be open Friday through Sunday from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. The walk-up window offers two soft serve flavors — purple vanilla (purple, but tastes vanilla) and chocolate milk — as well as sandcastle ice cream sandwiches, ice cream cake slices, and quakes — shakes blended with toppings.

Cones can be dipped in hard shell chocolate, butterscotch, or strawberry passion fruit flavors; and other toppings include rainbow sprinkles, Newman’s O’s crumbles, coconut cake crumbs, and hot fudge, just to name a few. The sandcastle sandwich is made with cookies that have all the toppings baked in.

The Pastry Project’s co-founders Emily Kim and Heather Hodge share a nostalgia for soft serve the way they experienced it as kids, which led to the project’s first soft serve season last year.

“I know that [Emily] had her soft serve stand that she went to as a kid, and I had mine that I went to as a kid in upstate New York,” Hodge said. “We just have a super love for soft serve and we thought it would be fun to throw this together.”

Kae-Lin Wang

“We did it last year on kind of a low key basis,” Hodge said. “But this year we’re trying to blast it out a little bit more and have a really fun soft serve summer.”

Located in Pioneer Square, last year’s soft serve events would sometimes draw lines around the block, especially if the pop-up coincided with a game at Lumen Park or Art Walk. This year, The Pastry Project’s frozen cookie dough will also be available for purchase at the soft serve window.

“We are starting a new line of take and bake goods,” Kim said. “We’re starting with our favorite cookies, The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie and The Reverse Chocolate Chip.”

The Pastry Project provides classes, free baking and pastry training programs for individuals with barriers to opportunity, and incubator residency programs that support small businesses in their early stages. It even has a cookbook and tool library for people to check out and learn in their own kitchens.

Hodge and Kim met years ago at Molly Moon’s Ice Cream where Hodge was the head chef and Kim was the director of social impact and marketing director. They launched The Pastry Project in 2019 as a way to provide free training programs to people facing barriers in the pastry and baking industries. The social enterprise is funded through donations, classes, subscription boxes, and pop-up events like the soft serve window.

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