A Kitsilano ice cream shop is blending real gulab jamun into vanilla ice cream for a Diwali sundae, running October 25 to November 15.
Killer Ice Cream on West 4th Avenue is calling it the Killer Gulab Jamun Sundae.
The team makes it in-house, blending locally made gulab jamun dessert balls into its vanilla ice cream base.
If you haven’t had it, gulab jamun is a South Asian dessert of soft dough balls made from milk solids, deep-fried and then soaked in a sugar syrup often flavoured with cardamom and rose water.
It’s then drizzled with a cardamom-rosewater syrup and finished with crushed pistachios and edible rose petals.
Both toppings are optional, so you can keep it to just the ice cream and syrup.
In the shop’s photo, the scoops come in a kraft paper cup, flecked green and pink with the pistachio and petals.
The sundae is $12.50 plus tax.
The idea started as a test.
“As massive fans of Indian cuisine and obsessed with the unique flavours and syrupy sweetness of gulab jamun, we wanted to see if it would blend as wonderfully into our ice cream as we suspected,” the team says.
The scoops turned out well enough, they say, that it became a special feature sundae for a limited time.
Blending is how Killer works every day.
Its regular ice cream is vanilla blended with real frozen fruit and made to order, and the shop’s own FAQ is firm that it is not soft serve.
There are vegan coconut and cashew-coconut bases too, plus a vanilla frozen yogurt churned in-house.
Muralist and graphic artist Leslie Phelan Glik opened the shop with her husband, German Glik, in spring 2024.
The name is a nod to orcas as much as to the treats, and Kitsilano is still its first and only location.
Festival-goers may remember Killer from this summer’s Vancouver Ice Cream Festival, where it sandwiched freshly churned pear frozen yogurt and watermelon ice cream inside OohLaLa donuts.
The timing lines up with Diwali, which falls on November 8 this year, right in the middle of the sundae’s run.
It’s a sweet excuse for a Kits walk if you’re celebrating, or a first taste of gulab jamun in scoop form if you’ve never had it.
The sundae is only around from October 25 until November 15, so it’s one to plan for rather than stumble into.
It lands in a busy month for Vancouver’s sweet and caffeinated spots, alongside new openings like % Arabica at Oakridge Park, C Market Coffee downtown and The Moon in Gastown.
Address
3659 West 4th Avenue, Vancouver BC
