IT was the perfect summer Sunday.

Breakfast on South Freo’s cafe strip and ice cream with mates at the new vegan ice creamery Roho Bure in the afternoon.

I’d been hearing good things about Roho, and for good reason, as their ice creams were so rich and creamy it was hard to believe they weren’t regular, high quality, gelato.

The last morsel gone, Catherine flopped dramatically back in her chair with a Homer Simpson grunt of contentment.

“That was sooo good.”

Nutty flavour

She’d had the coconut vanilla, while the rest of us had a salted maple peanut, a chicory chocolate and a cardamon and strawberry ($6.50 each).

“The strawberry is really good, not sweet, just real flavour, and the hint of cardamon was just beautiful,” Brigitte said.

My peanut and maple had plenty of nutty flavour overlaid with a sweet maple spiciness.

D’Angerous Dave enjoyed the chocolate and chicory: “The chicory gave it bittersweetness that was nice.”

The trendy young things at the next table raved about the specials of the day: a lemon and coconut and a blueberry bake with almonds.

Some of the ice creams contain natural sweetener xylitol, which is bad for dogs, so we spoilt our pampered pooches with a doggy ice lolly ($1).

The peanut butter-based, bone-shaped concoctions had the mutts slobbering more than usual as they wolfed them down.

Roho’s vegan owner Georgina Terrana was sick of only finding watery sorbets at ice cream shops, and reckoned others would feel the same way.

So she turned the garage of her two-storey home into a “hole-in-the-wall” shop, and turned her back on the corporate world of recruitment for the sweetness of creating her own ice creams.

Organic coconut powder and organic coconut sugar, or xylitol, a corn starch alcohol sugar, are the base ingredients, and the flavours are real, not prepackaged mixes.

“Everything is the real deal, if it’s strawberry, it’s real organic strawberries,” Terrana says.

The more sugar used in ice cream the more air is incorporated, but with natural sugar substitutes Roho Bure’s are thicker and creamier: “So you get more ice cream for your scoop.”

By JENNY D’ANGER

Roho Bure
322 South Terrace, South Fremantle