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| Aunty Vee's food truck |
Painted in blue and red with a jolly pink cupcake caricature,
Aunty Vee’s dessert truck isn’t hard to find among more than 50 food trucks
at the Chicago Food Truck Festival. Stacked in boxes and refrigerators inside
the truck are upside-down cakes, frozen cheesecakes on sticks and deep-dish
cookies in a variety of colors and flavors.
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| Some upside down cakes are loaded in a box inside Aunty Vee's food truck to be sold at the Chicago Food Truck Festival |
While Navena Moore, more popularly known as Aunty Vee,
scuttles around the truck to prepare for the festival, I sneak a peak at her
most recent creation, “Cheesecake on a stick.” This distinctive dessert is created
by freezing a regular cheesecake for about 24 hours and then slicing and coating
it with a layer of white or milk chocolate ganache or Nilla wafers. Moore says
she specializes in signature items and for her this creation is “an epitome of
a creamy dessert” almost perfect for summer time.
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| Sonia Lipov, a first-timer at Aunty Vee's tried this key lime cheesecake on a stick and said that it was "amazing" and it "gets colder in the middle." |
Her son, Kamal Holmes, pulls out five different flavors from
the freezer: the banana cream pudding, key lime, chocolate caramel cream, cookies
and cream and strawberries and cream. Each cheesecake ice cream is conveniently
packed in a plastic covering to keep it intact, which makes it look less
appealing than an average cheesecake. I decide to try the banana cream pudding
variant just because they tell me it’s the most popular.
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| Aunty Vee offered these five types of frozen cheesecakes on sticks during the Chicago Food Truck festival. |
I take off the wrapper. The gold-colored triangular dessert looks
irresistible as the Nilla wafer crumbs cover the frozen cheese cream on the
inside. I try to hold it close to the box to keep it from falling on the ground
and take the first bite. The crunchy wafer crust blends with the cold sour
cream and melts in my mouth leaving a lingering taste of bananas, sugar
and cream.
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| The banana cream pudding cheesecake on a stick looks irresistible. |
The dessert has a rich and smooth consistency and isn’t as frozen as I expected. It’s slightly hefty to hold all the
time but is light and fluffy on the inside that makes it easier for me to savor
it without feeling too stuffed. This cheesecake ice cream reminds me of a banoffee
pie (an English dessert pie made of bananas, cream and toffee) but the
experience is precisely like eating a satisfyingly cool banana cheesecake from
a stick: an ice cream that doesn’t melt.
Priced at a decent $6, the frozen cheesecake on a stick is
one of the most refreshing and soothing things I have tried this summer.
Where to find Aunty Vee’s?
Usually at Clark and Monroe, Jackson and Van Buren, Adams
and Wacker or at food festivals around Chicago and its suburbs.
