It all began in 2016, we embarked on yet another family holiday to Thailand and saw the Thai ice cream rolls. We fell in love with the concept and realised that there was hardly anything like this available in the UK! My mum was dissatisfied with her current job, and I had no idea what I wanted to do whilst at college, so we made the decision to venture into business together as a mother-daughter team. Being very naive we ordered an Ice cream pan machine from China and dedicated countless hours at home in the kitchen to master the art of creating ice cream rolls (it was a lot more difficult than we imagined lol). After persistent efforts, we succeeded in creating the recipe, and "Ice Queenz" was born!

After discovering the perfect location, we proudly launched our shop in Barnsley. As the business grew, so did our menu as we knew we couldn’t just have a shop selling ice cream rolls in the middle of Barnsley, in winter. So we decided to include other desserts such as waffles, crepes and cookie dough along with coffees and milkshakes. 

However, as time went on, we realised that ice cream rolls weren’t quite the right fit, honestly they were so time consuming and the brand as a whole felt kind of childish we wanted to move the business towards a new direction. So.. we went on a course to master the art of making gelato and fell in love with it! With this newfound passion, we made the decision to transition from ice cream rolls to gelato (best decision we ever made).

Obviously because the Ice Queenz brand was so deeply rooted in the world of ice cream rolls, we decided to rebrand to make the switch from ice cream rolls to gelato. The Ice Queenz brand was very much revolved around the ice cream rolls we thought this was the best decision! 

As the Market Kitchen started to get really busy, Dolly’s Desserts was growing in popularity within Barnsley, growing week by week. However, when lockdown hit due to the coronavirus pandemic, this brought an abrupt halt to operations, forcing Dolly’s to close its doors indefinitely. Like many small businesses, there was uncertainty of what the future would hold for the business.

Just when they though it couldn’t get any busier, even more people came to visit Dolly’s, leaving queues snaking around the market. Meanwhile, we  continued to make all of the bakes for the shop from our home kitchen. With timing once again on our side as Barnsley’s brand new Glass Works refurbishment was taking place, it became evident that the natural next step would be to open our very own store! 

From here on we gave our undivided attention to creating the ultimate Dolly’s experience in our sit-down store. We poured our hearts into the shop and built this from the ground up, with every detail being meticulously planned in order to give that complete luxury experience. Finally in December 2022, just a week before Christmas, we proudly opened the doors and our vision of Dolly’s was brought to life!

The new year brought in new opportunities for our brand, we began the year with a visit to Italy to learn new skills, with the skills in place we started making Gelato cakes to order, we continue to experiment, even making a 20 layer gelato cake to sell in store by the slice. As we’ve settled into our store we’ve had some exciting collaborations with brands such as, Archies, Tango, Nutella, Now TV, Clomana and then the offer to write our very first book… we can’t wait for what the rest of 2024 holds.