Ben and Jerry's Spectacular Speculoos

Next in our cookie core reviews we have Spectacular Speculoos.  This is described as

Dark caramel and vanilla ice creams with speculoos cookies and a speculoos cookie butter core.

Madeline's Review:  The first thing I expected to taste in the ice cream was the spicy goodness of speculoos cookies, but the first thing I actually tasted was vanilla.  I won't say much about the vanilla base because it is the same old Ben and Jerry's vanilla base.

The dark caramel was interesting.  I know what makes chocolate dark, but I do not know what makes caramel dark.  I suppose this caramel ice cream leaned a bit toward molasses flavor, but not that much.  Overall, it was a pretty mild flavor.

The speculoos cookie chunks were super duper crunchy, which was awesome, and they were also quite tasty.

The speculoos cookie core didn't have quite the same crunch as the other cookie cores (but this might be due to fluctuations in freezer temperature).  It did, however, taste like amazing, liquefied speculoos cookie amazingness.

Cookie monster may be the cookie monster, but I am the cookie butter monster.

It may sound like I bashed some elements of this ice cream, but overall it was an enjoyable flavor experience.  The one thing I felt this flavor lacked was a really bold base.  I feel like either a caramel/molasses or molasses/vanilla combination would have worked really well to give this flavor a kick.

Lizzy's Review: My expectations for this ice cream were really really really high. I literally eat sunny butter and cookie butter sandwiches for lunch everyday. I eat cookie butter straight out of the jar on a regular basis. I like Speculoos cookies but I LOVE LOVE FLIPPING LOVE cookie butter.

I'll start with the ice creams. I'm also not sure what makes caramel dark, maybe it is cooked for longer? However, I felt that the flavor of this ice cream was stronger than the caramel ice cream in boom chocolatta. The vanilla base was pretty strong, too. They both held their own against the cookie butter. Some people might like that, but I really wanted the cookie butter flavor to steal the stage. It was definitely center stage, but I felt the other flavors competed a bit with it. But again, I am biased because I literally eat plain cookie butter all the time. 

The core was good. It was a bit denser/less spreadable than actual cookie butter, but that could be due to the temperature. It wasn't a negative at all. I really think they were spot on with the core. Another thing about the cores in all of the core flavors I have eaten so far, there is a high volume of them at the beginning and end of the pint, but they wane in the middle. 

Lastly the cookies. The cookies were interesting. The taste was perfect, but the texture was strange. Some of the cookies were really really hard and crunchy. Others were softer and moist. Some of the super hard ones kinda surprised me. I would have preferred a consistent consistency (lol). 

Again like Madeline, it kind of sounds like I'm bashing this ice cream. There are minor things that I might do differently if I made the ice cream. However, it was flipping amazing and I am definitely thankful a major ice cream brand has made a cookie butter ice cream (don't worry a review of Trader Joes's version isn't far away). I would also definitely buy this again and is up there in my favorite Ben & Jerry's flavors.