Our big news is that if you happen to be in Nu Zuland, Auckland specifically, you can now buy our ice cream sandwiches. The team who own a swag of bars and restaurants in the new waterfront Britomart complex (including the Kiwi branch of District Dining) decided that the average Kiwi’s life was not complete without Pat and Stick’s. We naturally agreed and, with the help of our amazing friend Mike Murray at Prestige Foods in Melbourne and Mainfreight International, we’re now shipping our sammies to the land of milk and butter. Awesome! So if you have any Kiwi friends, spread the word, they’re available at Sarge’s, a cool Airstream serving coffee and food in Britomart. The global domination has begun.

With the Open Air Cinema now all wrapped up (it was a wet season, but still a good season) we’re praying to the dry gods that Taste of Sydney this coming weekend will be kind to us. If it does happen to be raining though, never fear, we’ve got something HOT for you all.

Pat, you see, has been growing habanero chillis on his balcony. The nuclear kind. The kind where just a taste will send you running to find the nearest fire extinguisher. But this doesn’t worry Pat. He likes his heat and adds chilli to almost everything. Including, now, an ice cream sandwich.

After Pat got his first harvest of habaneros, he ground them up, threw them in a mix of our Belgian chocolate ice cream, added a dash of cinnamon for good measure, churned it, slapped two choc fudge cookies on it and said: “Hey, guess what I just made? Some Hot Chocolate.” They are kind of hot. And they’ll be available as our very special ice cream sandwich at Taste. If the feedback is good enough we may just launch them into our freezers. With big red stickers that say “WARNING –WHEN WE SAY HOT WE’RE NOT KIDDING”. Stay tuned.

And we’d like to say a big thank you to new outlets that now have Pat and Stick’s onboard. It’s cool to finally have a presence down in Geelong, thanks to the fantastic A Spot for Joe. Melba’s Food Hall in Brunswick and Le Cirque Fine Foods are also new stockists down Melbourne way. And if you’re in Sydney and live or work around St Leonard’s, boy do we have a treat for you – both Zach’s Kafe Kitchen (right next to the Fitness First which we find highly amusing) and Fast Fruit in the Forum now have freezers of ours. Boo-ya!

Well that’s it for this update – we hope to see our Sydney based fans at Taste of Sydney for some hotness, and wish everyone else a dry and temperate autumn!

The first and decidedly most exciting story is that we have new flatmates. Our production facility, located at Unit 4, 3 Wood Street, Tempe (right next to the brand spanking new IKEA – we look onto their loading docks) is now a hubbub of food production. The amazing Pepe Saya handmade cultured butter now calls Wood Street home, along with the delectable Homemade Fine Foods (the makers of scrumptious deserts like chocolate mousse and crumbles) and the divine Booza Ice Cream (a dessert delicacy of the Levantine region, served as petit fours).

Best of all, we’re now open for wholesale purchases. There’s an amazing array of our ice cream sandwiches, ice cream tubs, desserts, butter and other delicacies, all available for tastings and purchase at wholesale prices. Much preferable to those Swedish meatballs! So if you’re in the Tempe area, we’d love to see you.

With Christmas just around the corner comes the release of our Christmas Cookie – delicious cassata ice cream with a gingerbread cookie. We started dispatching the CC to our retailers a week ago. You can either find your nearest stockist using our Facebook store locater, see us down at the Eveleigh markets (we’ll be there every Saturday during December) or even better, drop into Tempe to get your stash. As always, they are available for a limited time so get in quick.

We’ve slowly been increasing our network of stockists around Sydney and Melbourne, but the big news is that we finally have a retailer up in Brisbane. The incredible Sourced Grocer, located at 11 Florence Street Teneriffe, has a freezer of ours and from all accounts the reaction from Brisbanites has been fantastic. About time we got up there! If you have any friends or family in Brisbane, we’d greatly appreciate if you could let them know.

And last but not least, if you ever wondered how our ice cream sandwiches are made, all, well, almost all, is revealed in a video that was produced by Rob Locke from Food Wine Dine. We love Rob – not only did he introduce us to Pepe Saya and the team, he’s probably the nicest guy around. His video is on the homepage of our website.

We hope that the end of the year is a good one for you. We’ll try to squeeze in one more update before Christmas – meanwhile, hope to see you down in Tempe or around the traps!

Do you have friends or family that live or work around Chatswood? Then we’d love you to tell them about our little retail experiment. Please let them know with the appropriate exhortations to visit and try the product. And of course, if you happen to work in the area, or are a regular to the mall, we’d love to see you too.

In what can only be described as a long, long overdue event, we finally have some stockists in Sydney’s CBD. The amazing Azuma Patisserie at 501 George Street has a freezer of ours. So you can eat an ice cream sandwich alongsides their amazing chiffon cakes. Yum. Lucky Thai Groceries in Campbell Street is also stocking our sandwiches, along with the City South Convenience store which is very convieniently located right next to the infamous Chat Thai also on Campbell Street.

And down by Broadway way, the Broadway Convenience store now has our sandwiches and tubs. As they are open 24 hours a day, there will be no way for Ultimo locals to resist any late night Pat and Stick’s cravings. We apologise in advance.

As always, if you have any stockist suggestions let us know! Our very best, Pat and Stick

And while our plans haven’t exactly gone astray they have certainly been held up. So while we hoped to have a new sandwich in our freezers everywhere, we only have about 80 of them, a name and a requirement for your feedback.

Presenting what we have called: The Apple Strudel Snicker Doodle. Green apple ice cream with a delightful cinnamon dusted sugar cookie. Wonderful! We think. But we need to know what you think. Saturday June 4th. Eveleigh markets. We’ll be there. And if you want to try the Apple Strudel Snicker Doodle so should you.

But for those who can’t make the markets be not sad. For we have released two new tub flavours that should be available in most places that stock Pat and Stick’s. And if they’re not, demand that they are! The first is Peppermint Choc Crunch. We’ve sourced these neat little balls of chocolate covered crunchy cereal and added them to our peppermint ice cream. The second is Butter Pecan. Three words only – Track. This. Down. Pecans are lovingly toasted in butter and added to a light caramel ice cream. Crunchy, salty, smooth, sweet. Amazing stuff.

And we’ll have both with us tomorrow, along with the Apple Strudel Snicker Doodle. Prizes for those who can say it five times without stumbling. If people like it, it will be everywhere, soon. Promise. So long as no plans go astray.

We were honoured to get the chance to join forces with chef Luke Mangan and supply our Vanilla Choc ice cream sandwiches to Virgin Blue airlines. For the last couple of months, Virgin offered our Vanilla Choc (under Luke’s brand) as a special on all Virgin flights around Australia. Naturally we were thrilled to have gotten on-board and, while the special has now ended, we hope that once the winter chill gets chased away, people will once again be able to enjoy our ice cream sandwiches at 36,000 feet above the sea. For a company our size, it was a wonderful opportunity and we’d like to thank Luke and Narelle from Luke Mangan, Rick and the dedicated Virgin catering team for making it happen. You guys rock!

Before Virgin kicked off, we had just finished another fantastic year down at Sydney’s amazing Open Air Cinema. Our thanks to Rob and Anna from Cinerent for having Pat and Stick’s there. As with Luke Mangan and Virgin, it would have been easy for them to get the big corporate ice cream companies to sell their stuff but they resisted and once again chose to support a business that’s proudly Australian owned and locally made. Just brilliant.

So what’s next? We’re going to have a tinker with our menu. It’s been a while since we introduced a new ice cream sandwich flavour so Pat’s plotting and scheming and whipping up some batches of ice creamy cookie goodness. We’ll have the new flavour in all of our stockists at the beginning of June and will kick it off with a fun wee competition, details will be in your inbox closer to that date.

And for the Sydney locals, we’re happy to say that we’ll finally be back at the Eveleigh markets. Over winter we’ll be at Eveleigh every couple of weeks – the first Saturday of the month and the third Saturday of the month. Next date is May 21st, which is also the day of the Finders Keepers markets…come on down, it should be a blast!

The season is now in full swing and there are always a couple of hundred door sales every night so even if you missed out on pre-sales, anyone can head on down. With a full bar, delicious coffee from the boys at Latteria and catering from the mouth smackingly yummy Belinda Franks, the scene at Open Air as the sun goes down over the Opera House and Harbour Bridge is just magical. And with the weather so nice and balmy, it’s the perfect temperature for one of our ice cream sammies!

We’d like to thank Rob, Anna and the team for supporting us. It would be easy for them to get the big corporate ice cream companies to sell their stuff but they have resisted and have chosen to support a business that’s proudly Australian owned and locally made.

You guys are just terrific – thanks so much. Being able to sell our sandwiches at the St George Open Air is a real help to our business. Here’s to the entire team at Cinerent for their vision and passion.