Manchester’s first dessert bar has arrived on the hottest day of the year - and this gluttonous pleasure palace is bound to be a big hit in Manchester.

Milk Jam is the combined culinary might of Ginger’s Comfort Emporium owner and ice cream master Claire Kelsey, extravagant cake creator Bakeorama’s Charlotte O’Toole, and Lushbrownies queen Nicky Griffiths.

The trio have taken over a unit at 85 Oxford Street, sandwiched between Patisserie Valerie and Fresco Deli, in a former hairdressing salon. And they’ve decorated it in the same vivid style that they approach the art of pudding making.

Colourful graffiti marks out three dessert zones: ice cream, cakes, and brownies. There’s a bubble gum helter-skelter where you can collect an old fashioned gumball to make your own softserve Screwball, and a made-to-order milkshake bar where takeaway cartons are filled with your own choice of sweet shake.

(Image: Andy Lambert)

(Image: Andy Lambert)

Never a feature at Kelsey’s Ginger’s Comfort Emporium - which has a mobile van as well as a permanent home across town at Afflecks Palace, in the Northern Quarter - but a huge deal here are the piles of homemade toppings and sauces for the ice creams.

Everything from vanilla to beer flavoured ice creams can be topped with black olive flakes, red velvet cake crumb, blue cheese pretzels, pork scratching-style cinnamon chips, and a mysterious multicoloured crumble known only as unicorn poo.

(Image: Andy Lambert)

(Image: Andy Lambert)

Toppings include the pouring sauce to which the space owes its name - milk jam is a vanilla condensed milk, and there’s a truffle honey version and a take on best selling Ginger’s ice cream Chorlton Crack, the salted caramel and peanut butter based crack sauce.

Bakorama will be making a new selection of cakes every day, plus favourites like Red Velvet, at £4.70 a slice. A fully decorated seven-inch cake is £35 (she is also doing 11-inch cakes to order).

(Image: Andy Lambert)

Lushbrownies boasts 12 different types of brownie, two ‘blondies’, and brownie pops and kebabs with the chocolate treat on a stick, at £2.50 each.

Predominately designed for take away, Milk Jam also has outside seating and a basement dining space with a kitsch corner, a romantic fairy-lit table, and four funky former sink seats left over from the salon.

The parlour is now open daily from 11am to 8pm.