Sweet of the Week: Banana Cream Pie Concrete at Scooter's Frozen Custard

Before summer trickles away and our dessert appetites shift from ice cream to hot chocolate, I am desperately trying to eat as much iced sweets as possible. Not that I completely do away with ice cream in the cooler months or anything, I just think it's more socially acceptable to binge when it's hot out and everyone expects it. One of the essential summer staples in Chicago is Scooter's Frozen Custard, a seasonal dessert haunt in Lakeview revered for their buttery thick custards that serve to outdo even the most decadent of ice cream sundaes. By infusing their custards with egg yolk, the resulting treat is thicker, denser, slightly warmer, and smoother than most ice cream. This also endears it to the concrete treatment, a sort of hodgepodge sundae made by mashing up toppings with custard until it's all one big cohesive and indulgent mess. My favorite of their concretes is the banana cream pie variety, a hefty dish that serves to exponentially raise the bar on banana cream pie itself. 

(Scooter's Frozen Custard)

The concrete formula goes like this at Scooter's Frozen Custard: select a custard flavor first, add in your desired toppings or opt for a pre-selected flavor combo, and select a size. Bear in mind that the large size is comparable to a Trenta beverage at Starbucks, and it's a LOT to mess around with. My go-to is the banana cream pie concrete. Made with a vanilla custard base, it's all blended with fresh banana slices and graham cracker crumbs, resulting in all the same toasty, nutty, fruity, and creamy flavors of a silken banana cream pie, but so much better because it's all entirely immersed in frozen custard and whipped cream. Before summer fades away, make sure you swing by Scooter's for a warm-weather fix and properly bid the season adieu. 

- Matt Kirouac