Ice cream cones and custom cakes are a specialty at shop
By Suzanne Cristallo
Imagine building a three-tiered wedding cake with ice cream. Lisa Daniels did. She is the creative daughter of Gary and Yvonne Daniels, who started Sweet Retreat, the ice cream store on Union Avenue in Los Gatos. Lisa constructed the alternating cake and ice cream-layered confection for a country club wedding. It was topped with whipped cream and sealed with a fondant cover. Fresh flowers adorned its layers.
Despite Gary's big worry about the possibility of meltdown, all went well. "It went like clock work," he says of the freezer-to-freezer transport of the cake that was displayed for guests for 20 minutes while it thawed nicely, thus enhancing its flavor.
More than three years and three stores later, the Danielses have made ice cream cake-making a big part of what their stores offer. Their privately owned corporation has two corporate stores--the Los Gatos location and another in San Jose--and one licensee in Morgan Hill, who will soon be joined there by another.
Besides the quality of their creative cakes, another big reason the Danielses have experienced a 40 percent per year growth rate in their stores can be attributed to quantity.
First-time customers ordering what they think is a modest single scoop cone are overwhelmed by a giant double scoop teetering on a flaky cone. Be forewarned. "What we call a triple is dangerous," laughs Gary, who has carried a vision of what an ice cream cone should look like since childhood. "I probably made a mistake," he says, reflecting on the size. "When you're a little kid, things tend to look a lot bigger."
At any rate, his customers can be assured that as long as he is president and CEO of Sweet Retreat, they will get their fair share. Eventually, Gary says he has plans to take his stores nationwide and upset the monopoly that competitor Baskin Robbins now enjoys.
There are 36 flavors for choosing, limited only by the store's physical accommodations, which were established by a previous ice cream store that operated in the Downing Center Plaza until 1996. More flavors can be ordered from Treat, the store's San Jose ice cream makers, either for cakes or specially catered events where guests are encouraged to create their own sundaes.
Yvonne specializes in making the cakes that run from full sheets to person-sized, and can reflect any theme. "We have a book of all the decorations to choose from," says Gary. "We can even decorate to mimic a greeting card and are only limited by copyright restrictions."
Ice cream stores are a far cry from what native Nebraskan Gary Daniels, 51, started out doing. A Yale University physics graduate, his work before starting the Sweet Retreat line was as a subcontractor for such companies as Rolm Corporation, which assigned the manufacture of their ephones to him. He met Yvonne when she came to work for his company as a quality control manager. Son David, now 25, and Lisa, 28, ran their own Sweet Retreat for a year before yielding to other vocations--she as a flight attendant/mother of three and he as a Hollywood scriptwriter. David recently achieved his first major entrance into the film world as an editorial and production assistant in the new Whoopi Goldberg film, Kingdom Come.
Sweet Retreat, 15545 Union Ave., Los Gatos. Open Sun.-Thurs., noon-10 p.m.; Fri., noon-11 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-11 p.m. 408.377.4884.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
