The Highland Coo Creamery Inc.

Most village ice-cream counters stop at the scoop. The Highland Coo Creamery adds Scottish tablet and shortbread to the same menu, and the name carries the accent — a coo is a Highland cow, and the shop leans into that heritage in the confectionery as much as on the sign. It sits on Metcalfe Street in the centre of Elora, a new counter running on soft serve, hard-serve flavours and a short list of baked sweets. The Scottish confections are not a sideline here; they are threaded straight through an offering most creameries would keep to cones and sundaes.

The frozen side covers soft serve and four hard-serve flavours, each poured in both regular and vegan versions, so a table that cannot agree on dairy still finds its plate. The soft-serve list runs long — pared down from the seventy-odd flavours the shop ran under its previous owners, but kept on as the backbone of the case. The named specials are where the counter shows its hand. The Quarry is a blue-raspberry ice cream shot through with gummy bears, bright and unapologetically candy-forward. The Tooth of Time goes the other way — key lime with coconut and graham crackers, a scoop that reads like a deconstructed pie. Both take their names from the Elora landscape, and both belong to a set of five locally named specials that give the menu a vocabulary drawn from the village rather than the freezer catalogue.

The Scottish thread is not decoration. Tablet — a dense, sugar-and-butter confection cooked to a fudge-like set — takes real technique to get right, and the shortbread beside it points to a kitchen that bakes rather than a counter that only scoops. Butter tarts and squares extend the case, giving Ontario's own baked classics a place beside the Highland ones — a tray of butter tarts and a slab of tablet sharing the same counter. It is a deliberately small menu, and the restraint is the point: on a list this compact, the tablet and shortbread carry the character that a wall of rotating flavours usually has to manufacture.

The creamery is run by sisters Stephanie Kirby and Carolyn Hill, with Kirby handling the baking — which is where the tablet, shortbread and tarts come from. The storefront came to them as Sugar Skulls, a Mexican-inspired parlour that had made this counter a village favourite, scooping under bright folk-art tile before it closed. The sisters opened the Coo in the spring of 2026 and kept what the neighbourhood had come for — the soft serve, the depth of the list, the daily habit of a scoop on Metcalfe Street — then painted the walls white, brought in barn board and exposed stone, and swapped one heritage for another. Where Sugar Skulls leaned on Mexico, the Coo leans on Scotland; the building has always been a themed sweets counter, and only the accent has changed. That is the tidy part of the lineage — the address kept its trade and its regulars, and the sisters added the Scottish half, Kirby's tablet and shortbread, as the layer that makes it theirs.

None of it is built for a long sit. Takeout is the operating mode, and it suits the way the counter actually gets used — a stop on the way to somewhere else, a cone for the walk down toward the water, a box of tablet and butter tarts carried home. The short menu answers what to order rather than how long to stay: a single scoop for the person who wants one thing, a named special for the person who wants a little story with it, a square of shortbread or tablet for the person who came for the baking.

The hours track the season. Through summer the counter opens daily from noon to eight; come autumn it narrows to Thursday through Sunday, holds on into December, then closes for the winter months entirely. That calendar is the truest description of the place — a warm-weather village stop, timed to the stretch when Elora fills with people heading for the gorge and the falls. They leave with a blue-raspberry scoop, a key-lime special, or a square of tablet wrapped for the walk back to the car, and the counter goes quiet again until the spring thaw brings both the crowds and the creamery back.