Somer & Searle

16 Apr

Words by Anna Van Dyk
Photography by Ariana Ruth

In volume two, we sat down for a chat and some ice cream with Somer and Searle. This London based duo are cycling their ice cream around the city to bring us the most interesting flavours you can think of.

The older I get, the more I realise how much adults need childish feelings in order to survive grown-up realities.

We need the aimless joy little kids find in running around in circles, with no goal in mind as a tonic for the banalities of every day life. Yesterday, in a fine demonstration of this, I watched a toddler eat a mozzarella ball with so much wonder; you would think he had discovered the secret of life. What a pleasure! To see the world in a grain of mozzarella! If I shared this outlook, Mondays wouldn't be half as bad, surely.

I would be so bold as to say that we crave these carefree feelings so much that we mostly go to ridiculous lengths in order to access them. Take, for example, the new fad of adults on scooters. What a strange thing to see as I brave my walk to work: grown men and women, in respectable suits and silly little helmets, scooting around the streets of Islington on what looks to be a comically enlarged version of the Zippy Nippy scooter I owned at age 11. The gateway to childhood has never been more desperately desired, or ridiculously attempted to access.

Thankfully, there is a another, simpler way to experience childhood feelings of glee and joy: ice cream.

Any grown up that has no memories of thick chocolate gelato smeared around the edges of the mouth (and most of the cheeks, hands and hair) has had a truly compromised upbringing. One slurp of the soft, cool treat sends me straight back to tween birthday parties, where the hosting mum would scoop vanilla ice cream into cheap cones and finish it with a flourish of garish, impossibly colourful sprinkles, much to the shrieking happiness of all little humans present. Today, no matter where I am in the world, or what mood I am in, ice cream is a perfect indulgence that, without fail, leaves me as perfectly sated and as totally stress free as my 5-year-old self.

And what a beautiful time it is to be an ice cream lover. For, dare I say it, artisan producers today are making the stuff better than lollies of my toddler dreams. Gone are the fluorescent orange popsicles of yore! Today we welcome in a wild variety of flavours that, by some miracle, adults have found a way to not only make it taste better, but to make far better for you, too.

Two champions of the endeavour to make ice cream tastier and healthier are the ladies behind London’s newest and most wonderful ice cream tricycle, Somer & Searle. Emma and Xanthe, both Zimbabwean born ice cream lovers living in London, are creating wholesome ice cream in surprising flavours, and cycling it in their blue tricycle (sweetly dubbed, “Fred”) to parks and events around the city. Rather cleverly, they tailor the flavour selection to the event or space they are popping up at. I encountered them at the London Brunch Festival, and am delighted to find breakfast-y flavours such as strawberry jam on rye toast, Rooibos tea and honey comb, banana bread and, my favourite, a perfectly balanced lemon curd. “No shitty sugar,” they promise me, and I can hardly believe this to be true, but it certainly is. Their ice cream is made with only the best natural, locally sourced ingredients. No need to add refined sugar to something with this much goodness and care.

My inner child has many wins over my adult lifestyle. She will always look cooler on a scooter or cuter in a pair of dungarees. She can pull off aimless running and she will most certainly be the only version of myself that can wear face paint in public. But, she will never know the magnificence of the ice cream from Somer & Searle, with flavours such as fresh fig and thyme, olive and dark chocolate, flat white with oat milk or caramel popcorn. Nor will she know tastes this exciting with half the amount of health damage that her ice cream did. Keep an eye open for this duos next pop-up – if only to prove to your inner child that being an adult ain’t all that bad, after all.