At Sweet Dreamz in Penacook, hardware, animals and ice cream mix every day.

The new soft-serve ice cream shop, located in an old hardware store, offers unique creations such as “The Unicorn” and “Plywood” in addition to thirty flavors of soft-serve, other sundaes, frappes, root beer floats and cookie sandwiches.

Owner Kim Mitchell, who works full-time for Thrive Pet Healthcare, purchased Fox Hardware on Village Street in 2022 with her husband, David. When she decided hardware was “boring,” she took over the lawn and garden sections of the store, put up some walls, created a walk-up window and gave Sweet Dreamz a home — all while incorporating her various interests.

“I wanted to make it this happy, magical, Willy Wonka kind of place,” said Mitchell, who lives in Concord. “So there’s stars. There’s hearts. There’s a lot of love in here. Everything’s colorful.”

Having never scooped ice cream before, Mitchell embarked on this journey when she put together a business plan in August and housed it in a thick, sparkly pink and purple three-ringed binder. This color scheme would later become her brand color palette.

By late March, all her materials and machines arrived, and Mitchell wondered if she could even make an ice cream swirl on a cone. It didn’t come easily at first, but she sat there with a box of cones and did it repeatedly until she got it right.

Vanilla soft-serve pup cups became one of the first items on the menu, an homage to Mitchell’s veterinary background.

“I know all the dogs in the neighborhood now, because they all come in and get pup cups,” said Mitchell.

The Rupee Dupee — Mitchell’s favorite sundae — is named after her four-year-old American Quarter horse, Rupert. It includes vanilla soft serve, Oreo pieces, marshmallow sauce and hot fudge, topped with a custom-made horse-shaped candy.

“It has nothing to do with ice cream. It has nothing to do with the store. It has nothing to do with anything, but it makes me happy,” said Mitchell, who currently runs the shop by herself, but sometimes gets help from her husband and her son.

Mitchell tries to stay as local as she possibly can, sourcing her milk from Contoocook Creamery and her root beer from Woodstock Brewery. She takes pride in her ingredients and even tried various samples of hot fudge and flavored syrups to find the perfect ones for her customers.

“My goal the entire time was quality,” said Mitchell. “It’s really particular to me that each thing that goes out that window is perfect.”

Mitchell mainly hands vanilla soft-serve out the window to her customers, since it serves as a base for most of her offerings.

“It has a different taste to the vanilla I’ve had before, but I like it a lot. It’s definitely unique amongst the ice cream I’ve had,” said Cameron Boomer, 17, of Loudon.

When Mitchell can’t find a product, she makes it. She needed biteable cookies for her ice cream sandwiches, so she tweaked her recipe until it worked. Her experiments don’t end there – while Sweet Dreamz is only open Friday to Sunday, Mitchell goes to the shop during the week to test out her new ideas. That’s how her brownie sandwiches were born.

She always wants her customers to have access to her ice cream, so during the week, she sells different flavored pints, ice cream sandwiches and ice cream pies from the freestanding glass freezer inside Fox Hardware. The flavor selection varies by day.

“You can grab a pint of soft serve, which you really can’t find around here,” she said. “Leave it out for ten minutes. That’s the consistency of soft serve, or you can eat it right out of the freezer, and it’s the consistency of hard serve. So you get the best of both worlds.”

Mitchell’s customers can also get creative because she allows them to mix and match any flavors or toppings they’d like. Once, a customer brought her a bottle of Country Time Lemonade and asked her to mix some with vanilla soft-serve — it was a hit.

“I was like, ‘Oh, it’s a little weird, but okay.’ So, I did it,” said Mitchell. “And she looks at me and she’s like ‘You need to try it.’ So I made myself a little tiny one. So good.”

Mitchell said that receiving support from the community in person and in the form of reviews has warmed her heart.

“The smiles say it all,” said Mitchell. “The kids that come in, the smiles that they bring are just game-changing.”

Operating Sweet Dreamz has been “a dream come true” for Mitchell and has also served as a way for her to connect with Penacook while bringing a quality product.

“I’ve learned that community is everything,” said Mitchell. “It’s all about the experience for me. It’s just going that extra mile to see the kids’ smiles. Like that’s totally what it is.”

Sweet Dreamz is open from 4 p.m to 8 p.m. on Fridays, 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturdays and 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Sundays. Customers can also buy Sweet Dreamz ice cream pints, ice cream sandwiches and ice cream pies in the freezer in Fox Hardware.

Yaa Bame can be reached at ybame@cmonitor.com