Two Girls One (ice cream) Cup

Here is my take on our St. Louis Ice Cream Extravaganza.

As Lizzy mentioned, our first stop was newly opened Jilly's Ice Cream Bar.  On their website they state that "Moaning out loud is totally acceptable."  That definitely happened.  Lizzy and I shared the Lucky Charms and Gooey Butter Cake flavors.  Lizzy covered the Lucky Charms flavor pretty well, so I will talk about the Gooey Butter Cake ice cream.  Officially named Gooey Butter Brownie Batter, this is described as

Gooey Butter Cake ice cream, Gooey Butter Cake chunks, vanilla cake morsels, brownie batter swirl.

This ice cream is totally rad, and is something I had been waiting my whole life for.  In fact, a few months ago, I posted a facebook status about how awesome gooey butter cake ice cream would be.

For those not in the know, gooey butter cake is a St. Louis dessert delicacy.  It was supposedly invented when a baker included too much butter in a recipe for yellow cake, but is there really such a thing as too much butter?  I think not.  This is a flat, dense cake usually about 3/4 of an inch think, perfectly buttery yellow in color and finished with a dusting of powdered sugar.  There are several variants on this including different flavors of gooey butter cake and gooey butter cookies.  If you want a totally unhealthy St. Louis dining experience grab some toasted raviolis (t-ravs) and gooey butter cake.

This ice cream lived up to its namesake.  The ice cream base was buttery and delicious.  I want to talk a moment about the texture of Jilly's ice cream.  Normally I strongly dislike hard ice cream and prefer softer ice cream that is easy to cut through with your spoon.  Jilly's is an exception.  The texture is like nothing I have ever tried before.  It is hard because it is thick and dense and almost chewy, not because it is over-frozen.  It's not something I would want every time I had ice cream, but it was definitely different and delicious.  Props.  The chunks of cake were huge and delicious and cakey.  Because ice cream is cold I sometimes cake chunks can get frozen and gross, but not these guys!  I didn't really get much of the brownie batter swirl, which was Lizzy's favorite part, but I don't really care.  The rest was delicious enough to make up for it.

After indulging at Jilly's, Lizzy and I traveled to Webster Groves to try Serendipity Homemade Ice Cream.  This ice cream shop is 10 years old and somewhat well known in the area.  For some reason, I was expecting the interior to be pretty hip, but it had more of a homey, mom and pop shop feel.  It had an awesome mural with some wise words to live by:

I think Lizzy and I paid about $5.50 for two scoops.  This was a bit more expensive, but we also got a bit more ice cream.  I wasn't expecting much from Serendipity's flavor offering based on the decor, but I was pleasantly surprised at the wide variety of flavor offerings.  From what I remember, there were your more typical scoop shop flavors and some weird ones like Chocolate Orange, Lemon Poppyseed, Banana Honey Sesame Seed, and some sort of cherry/alcohol flavor that I don't remember exactly.

Lizzy talked about the Cookie Monster ice cream, so I will talk about our other scoop: Banana Honey Sesame Seed.  This was a really interesting and complex flavor.  The first few bites tasted mainly of banana.  It was high quality banana flavor as it tasted like bananas, not banana flavoring.  After a few more bites I began to get used to the banana flavor and started picking up more on the honey and sesame seed flavors.

The honey was delicious.  This was definitely an adults-only honey flavor, not that joke stuff you get at the grocery store.  I think the honey wasn't necessarily mixed throughout, but instead there were crystals of high quality honey.  This was totally unexpected and amazing.  The sesame seeds gave the ice cream just a hint of texture and the perfect amount of savoriness.  They were definitely critical in balancing out the sweetness of the honey.  Serendipity definitely brought it with this flavor.