Peter Crolla Jr is a man who knows how to scoop a perfect sphere of ice cream.

He is being watched by the Cordiner family, who have just taken on the first Crolla Gelateria franchise, as he lowers an ice cream scoop into a rainbow chiller of 25 classic, crazy and creative combinations.

With the flick of a wrist, a ball of toffee ice cream is place in the centre of a vintage-style banana split plate, a Crolla branded wafer pressed on top.

There are foil sparklers for a little chintz, a row of sauces, bowls of sweets and cans of squirty cream to finish off each icy creation.

The company's newest gelateria harks back to the parlours of the past, but with flavours like blue bubblegum, Kinder egg and Irn Bru, the ice creamery is keeping things modern.

Crolla's ice cream may be soft and smooth, but its reputation and resilience is more akin to magical chocolate shell sauce. In 1895, a young Serafino Crolla travelled from his home in southern Italy to open his first ice cream shop on Glasgow's Queen Mary Street.

Fifteen years later his son Giuseppe Crolla would return to Scotland to open their second shop, but when the call came for Crolla to return to his homeland when war broke out, the ice cream dynasty was destroyed.

Rebuilding the business from scratch, the second world war soon arrived and Giuseppe returned to Italy, this time with his business guarded by his wife and son, who would later continue the family business.

Peter Crolla Snr, who currently runs the company's ice cream factory in Glasgow explains: "My Nonna, she ran the shop with my father who was too young and my aunt and they ran the shop throughout the war.

"She managed to save £500 and when my grandfather came back he opened up an ice cream factory with that money."

After the war, the family business began to move away from parlours and into vans, repurposing ambulances used in WWII to transport icy treats to the children of Glasgow.

Peter Snr reminisces: "I worked [in the family business] from about 11 or 12 years old, I started way back in what was called the ginger stores, I'd look after the lemonades and the iron brews.

"I had to count them for the vans. It was one of my first jobs looking after the ginger stores," he smiles.

But the familiar sound of tinny nursery rhymes and the reminder to Mind that Child started to disappear from the streets. Peter says the family noticed more people would sooner pick up a tub from the supermarket than run from their house to catch the van and so the company focussed on its factory instead, producing ice creams for restaurants and cafes.

It was something Carol Cordiner's family had also started to notice hundreds of miles away in Aberdeen. Her mother and father ran an ice cream van for 30 years, her uncle driving the van before them. Scooping ice cream brought her just as much joy as her parents, but having run the family business for five years, gave it up to work for the Royal Mail instead.

The 43-year-old explains: "It definitely wasn't as busy as it was 20 years ago, because obviously there's more ice cream shops on the market than ice cream vans."

Determined to rekindle her family's joy for scooping cones and oysters for families in the city, Carol searched for companies across Scotland to work with when she discovered Crolla's were looking to open a franchise gelateria to rekindle its own family name.

She admits: "A shop is something we probably should have done ten, 20 years ago."

The re-emergence of ice cream parlours, a modern day Willy Wonka factory for children and adults to pile sundae glasses high with scoops after scoop wth a shower of sprinkles helped to bring the Crolla name back into the public psyche.

After bringing the popular parlours back to Byre's Road in Glasgow as well as shops in Wishaw and Preston, Peter Crolla Jr persuaded his father to look into franchising with the Cordiner family the first to take on name, with a further franchise in the works for Perth.

Now Carol and her family have become the first to run a Crolla's gelateria outside of Glasgow, and the entire family is delighted to be scooping not just the traditional vanilla but apple pie, coconut and salted caramel ice creams to customers in their new home on Rosemount Place.

Beaming, Carol explains: "It's just the pleasure you give to the customer really. Obviously the children's faces and sometimes even the adults faces, the excitement of what we're going to make or what we're going to create, they get to choose what they want themselves.

"Ice cream always makes people happy."

All of the ice cream is made on site in the Aberdeen gelateria, some 80 recipes ranging from classic fruit flavours like strawberry and raspberry ripple to popular sweets like Kinder and Curly Wurly.

Peter Jr explains: "The recipe's not changed since 126 years ago, for ice cream everything is based on a vanilla and then you add your flavourings or your fruit.

"Now our gelaterias have recipes for over 80 different flavours although we'll have have 24 to 26 on display at a time, they'll rotate the flavours a lot and bring in new flavours all the time."

It may be a step away from the traditional vanilla scoop, but Peter Jr is keen to keep the Crolla name current.

Cold stone creations are a popular addition, where customers choose three different scoops to be piled on an ice cold marble slab which are cut together with sweets, fruit and sprinkles using a spatula, and pizza cones, a conical open-ended savoury calzone filled with margarita pizza mix.

But even with the cream of the ice cream crop at his disposal, Peter Jr still plumps for the classic cone time and time again.

"My favourite flavour is definitely the vanilla because everything is based on the vanilla.

"Vanilla with some raspberry sauce on it, the old traditional ice cream is still the best for me."