The Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog

I've reviewed a few Cedar Crest flavors on the blog before, including a stellar  Chocolate Malt  flavor.  For those not in the know, Cedar Crest is a Wisconsin based ice cream brand available throughout the Midwest.  I haven't reviewed more Cedar Crest flavors because, up 'til now, I have only found them in larger-than-pint containers.  Since there are only two of us in the house, and I often purchase flavors that Kyle doesn't like I am often the only lonely one to eat a flavor.  If I have to finish more than a pint of a flavor solo, sometimes more than a pint can feel like quite the long slog even if I love the flavor. The moral of the story is that I picked up a couple more Cedar Crest flavors because my grocery store recently started carrying pints! Hooray!  This is great because, in my experience, Cedar Crest makes some pretty freaking decent ice creams at a pretty freaking decent price (i.e. cheaper than B&J's and H-D). The first flav...

Oh man, another slam dunk from the new-ish Haagen-Dazs Artisan collection.  Ginger Molasses Cookie is a collaboration with  The Good Batch  bakery in Brooklyn, NY.  (Who, by the way, has a cookie of the month subscription if anyone wants to, like, buy that for me or something.)  Haagen-Dazs describes this flavor as Ginger molasses cookie pieces are mixed into gourmet vanilla cinnamon ice cream to create an artisan recipe inspired by the renowned bakery treats of The Good Batch in Brooklyn. First I'll talk about the base.  I think this is the first time, or at least the first time in recent memory that I have had a vanilla cinnamon base, and I don't understand why it isn't used more often.  Often, a plain cinnamon base has a very harsh base.  Here, the addition of vanilla balanced the cinnamon very well.  The vanilla gave the base flavor some warmth and depth to balance out the spiciness of the cinnamon and the cookies.  Also, y...

Red velvet cake is definitely high on my list of favorite non ice cream desserts. I tried this flavor for the first time almost 4 years ago and didn't really like it. And I honestly don't think I have had it since then. But around Valentine's Day there were lots of new red velvet desserts that I saw in stores. There were red velvet Oreo's (which were AMAZING) and there were red velvet M&M's exclusive to Wal-Mart, which were also pretty good. This obviously meant I needed to do a red velvet Sundae Sunday, so this ice cream had to be my base. The only other red velvet ice cream I have seen is from Blue Bell and I couldn't find any, so Ben & Jerry's it was. Pretty in pink! Another knock on this ice cream before we even start. I hate discrepancies. On the website the description of this flavor is Red Velvet Cake Batter Ice Cream with Red Velvet Cake Pieces & a Cream Cheese Frosting Swirl . The description on the pint is Red Velvet Cake Ice ...

I love Jimmy Fallon. I love ice cream. I love Ben & Jerry's. I was so stoked when I saw the release of this flavor. I got it this past weekend in St. Louis and was so excited to try it. Proof that sometimes I eat food other than ice cream. And healthy  food, at that! The description of this flavor is Caramel & Chocolate Ice Creams with Chocolate Cookie Swirls & Gobs of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough & Peanut Butter Cookie Dough . There is obviously A LOT going on here with this ice cream. I'll take it piece by piece. The flavor of the caramel ice cream was really mellow. If you set out to get a bite of just the caramel ice cream you could taste the flavor, but for the most part it was drowned out by the chocolate ice cream. Next the chocolate cookie swirl. I was expecting this component to be like the chocolate cookie swirl found in Chocolate Therapy. Instead, it reminded me of the chocolate cookie core in Boom Chocolatta. It had that crunchy, a...

Not too long ago, Madeline reviewed  the new Haagen Dazs Artisan Collection Tres Leches Brigadeiro ice cream. This ice cream is inspired by two dessert treats, tres leches cake and brigadeiros. Neither Madeline nor I have had brigadeiros. However, Madeline has never had tres leches cake while I have. First, I cannot believe I am related to someone who has never tried tres leches cake. I am going to fix that at the first opportunity I have. Ahhhh tres leches is soo good. It is one of my favorite things ever. If any of you, Dearest Reader, are so unfortunate and have not had tres leches I will describe it to you. It is a very, very, very moist cake made with obviously three milks. Those milks are sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, and heavy cream. Basically tres leches cake tastes like the best white/yellow cake you have ever had just soaked in sugary sweet amazing milk. Like literally liquid pours out of the cake when you put your fork in it. I wrote that description w...

"Why hello there peanut!" I said as I dug into a bowl of Talenti's Salted Peanut Caramel.  This flavor is the last of 3 new flavors from Talenti that I picked up at the grocery store this week.  Talenti described this gelato as We started with our salted peanut gelato and add in large, halved, dry-roasted peanuts and a swirl of salted caramel, because someone else needed to be invited to this peanut party. I was pretty excited about this flavor after reading  On Second's Scoop 's positive review, but I was a bit let down.  The base tasted a bit bland to me.  It wasn't super salty and it wasn't super peanut flavored.  It wasn't necessarily bad, but a bold base flavor could have taken this pint to the next level. Boy, they were not kidding about the large peanuts.  These were awesome.  It is very rare to see peanuts in ice cream in a form other than crushed peanuts.  People should do it more often.  I could forgive the som...

Hazelnut.  Hazelnut hazelnut hazelnut.  Hazelnut hazelnut hazelnut hazelnut hazelnut.  Hazelnut. Seriously, if you are a hazelnut fan, drop what you are doing and go find a pint of Talenti's new Hazelnut Chocolate Chip gelato.  Oh my god, it was so good. From Talenti's website: We loved our creamy, traditional, perfect hazelnut gelato so much that we had to give it some friends.  And by friends, we mean tons of roasted hazelnuts and bits of rich chocolate chips.  Giving - isn't tha what love is all about? I think the description above got it exactly right.  Talenti's Hazelnut flavor is very traditional version of a very traditional gelato flavor.  Sometimes the best thing is to throw tradition out of the window. The hazelnut flavor here is way better than in Talenti's Hazelnut.  PROBABLY BECAUSE THERE ARE LITERAL CHUNKS OF HAZELNUT IN THIS FLAVOR. You read that right.  Chunks of hazelnut.  Not only were there ...

I had quite the ice cream adventure while in Iowa City visiting the University of Iowa. There are no independent ice cream shops in down town Iowa City, so after having some some tasty Thai food in down town Iowa City, I drove a bit out of town to try an ice cream shop called Heyn's Ice Cream. I had to rush because I thought they were closing soon. When I got there I saw two cop cars in the parking lot. My first thought was, "Oh the Iowa City PD is cool, they like ice cream!" But when I got to the door, it was locked. An employee came out and told me they had received a call threatening the employees, so they had to call the cops and close early. I was sooo devastated. As I got into my car to drive away, I saw a family try to go in and experience the same disappointment. After a lot of running that day, the Thai food did not fill me all the way up so I needed some ice cream. There are some fro yo shops in Iowa City, but I was really feeling some ice cream, not fro yo. L...

Not too long ago, I was sent, by my friend Bronwyn, a picture of a pint of Ben & Jerry's called Blondie Ambition. It was an exclusive flavor, and she told me she had gotten it at Target. At first, I was really excited because I thought it was a new flavor. But the more I thought about it, I realized they might have just renamed their Rockin' Blondie flavor. I never want to miss trying a Ben & Herr's flavor, so just to be safe, I purchased a pint. I took the pint over to my old apartment, where my friends Bronwyn and Katy still live, and where we have our Ben & Jerry's tower stored, and compared the descriptions. Alas, the descriptions were the same. They had just renamed this pint. The description of this flavor is Buttery Brown Sugar Ice Cream with Blonde Brownies & Butterscotch Toffee Flakes . By this point in the blog, you may be starting to get to know my ice cream tastes. This is not something I would normally pick up, so I'm glad I kind...

Talenti put out 7 new flavors for 2015, and I managed to find three of them on my last trip to the grocery store.  Kyle thought it would be ridiculous to buy all three at once, and he thought I should pick only 2, but I snuck the third flavor into the cart. I couldn't decide which flavor I was most excited to try, so I let the good people of Facebook decide, and they chose Oatmeal Raisin Cookie. I sadly never got the chance to try the much missed Ben and Jerry's Oatmeal Cookie Chunk, so unfortunately I will be unable to compare the Talenti for those of you who miss OCC, but I'll try to do a good enough job describing the Talenti to hopefully give you an idea of how they compare. The first flavor I notice biting into this ice cream is cinnamon and ....... something else that I can't put my finger on.  Was it nutmeg?  Clove?  Some other weird spice?  I finally read the ingredient list, and I think the mystery flavor was molasses.  I have person...

Every once in a while you've just gotta have a classic. For me, and for many others, drumsticks are reminiscent of childhood summers and the ice cream truck coming by. I have memories of drumsticks being really, really tasty and exciting. But before I review them, lets have a little history lesson. And by history lesson, no I do not mean me talking about my childhood; I do not think I am yet old enough that I can call my childhood "history". (Although my students are often baffled that not only am I older than Facebook, I am also older than YouTube!!) What I do mean is a history lesson on waffle cones and drumsticks. As legend has it, at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, an ice cream maker ran out of bowls to serve ice cream in. Next to him was a waffle vendor. The ice cream guy asked the waffle guy for some waffles, and served his ice cream in rolled up waffles instead of bowls. And the waffle cone was born! Twenty four years later, the Parker bro...

Here's the last of the cookie core reviews: Peanut Buttah!  This flavor is described as Peanut butter ice cream with crunchy peanut butter sugar bits, peanut butter cookies and a peanut butter cookie core. Madeline's Review: First of all, I don't know what is up with this name.  Oh well.  Let's move through this flavor element by element.  First the ice cream.  The peanut butter ice cream was pretty darn good.  It tasted like the sweet-peanut butter filling of a peanut butter pie, and had the same smooth consistency, but denser. The peanut butter cookies were soft and chewy, and tasted a bit more peanut-buttery and less sweet than the base ice cream. When I read the description of this ice cream, I was most excited about the peanut butter sugar bits, but I was a bit disappointed.  The bits were pretty small, about the size of nerds candy.  They were very crunchy, so added some nice textural variation.  For some reason, when I re...