By late March, cars are already lined up at the Cool Tiger Ice Snowballs drive-thru. In the 90-degree weather, customers wait in their cars, blasting the A/C and anticipating the cool, sticky sugar rush. Inside the humming, pastel-yellow snoball shack, owner Debbie Nelson whips up one colorful creation after another: bananas foster praline, Blue Suede Shoes, Key lime pie.
Nelson is picky: For her cheesecake-stuffed snoballs, she won’t use anything but her own homemade cheesecake. When she decided she didn’t like any store-bought ice cream-flavored syrups, she made her own instead. In her ice cream-stuffed snoballs, she refuses to serve any ice cream brand except Blue Bell (“I’ve tried every ice cream known to man, and I cannot believe how good Blue Bell is,” she says). Guests also have the option of getting their snoballs served in a fresh-cored pineapple.
It’s this, perhaps, that keeps customers coming back for more. One Cool Tiger devotee even picks up her snoball order, loads it into a cooler and drives it all the way to her daughter in Indiana each year, Nelson says.
