The Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog

Today I have a review of Sam's Choice Blackberry Crumble.  Sam's Choice is a Wal-Mart brand so obviously only available at Wal-Mart.  After really enjoying the Coffee and Donuts flavor last year, I have been meaning to go try out some other flavors in the line, but am just now getting around to it. Blackberry Crumble is described as Blackberry ice cream with Pie Crust Pieces and Blackberry Ripple. The blackberry base was very good.  Actual blackberries can be pretty tart and in-your-face, but this base shied away from that aspect of the flavor and went with a sweeter vibe.  I think it actually tasted like a 'mixed berries' flavor where blackberries are a large percentage of the mixture.  I'm a fan of bold, extreme flavors, so I would have liked this to be a bit more blam-pow-I'm-a-blackberry! but I think most people will enjoy the base as-is. The pie crust pieces were large and square, a little smaller than a quarter.  These were thicke...

I've officially survived my first week of graduate school! However, since it was only the first week of classes, the professor for the course I'm TAing decided to cancel subsections and all of my three hour seminar classes did not go the full three hours. I had a lot more free time this week than I probably will ever have again in my academic life. So with all my free time, Sunday evening I decided to go get frozen yogurt from Cate's, a shop in North Iowa City. If you haven't figured it out by now, I have a whole system of 8 questions with which I review frozen yogurt shops. Here they are if you have forgotten. 1) The variety of flavors: is there a good selection? 2) The flavor of my choices. 3) The quality of the combination of my choices. 4) The texture of froyo. 5) The variety of the toppings. 6) Quality of the toppings. 7) How well my toppings coordinated with my froyo flavors 8) Overall experience 1) A resounding nope on this question. There wer...

So far, I have only had one experience with Edy's relatively new Frozen Custard line and this experience was incredibly negative. However, plenty of ice cream bloggers out there, including Madeline, who disliked the Chocolate Malt custard flavor have enjoyed other offerings from this Edy's line. I felt like this flavor was extra promising because of the salty sweet potentiality and its uniqueness! More ice cream companies should be making flavors with pretzels in them. The description of this flavor on the Edy's website reads A perfect combination of sweet cream frozen custard, chocolaty covered pretzel pieces and a generous swirl of salted caramel.  I'm sure at this point you all know I am so totally over it with salted caramel flavors. And you would probably not expect a flavor from Edy's  of all companies would get me to change my mind on this. Well, I loved this frozen custard. The main reason? The salted caramel wasn't the only salty componen...

After eating, then later reviewing, Mountain House's Freeze Dried Neapolitan Ice Cream on my backpacking trip this July, Mountain House sent me 3 of their Freeze Dried Ice Cream sandwiches to try for free! My first free product from a food company! So exciting!! On first glance, this treat looks like a shrunken ice cream sandwich. I guess freeze drying will do that. First, bite, crunchy, chalky, and light, similar to the freeze dried ice cream. However, the chocolate cookie wafers were extra crunchy and hard. Taste wise, this treat tasted exactly like its frozen counter part. However, something about the artificial vanilla flavoring in, chalky, airy, freeze dried form reminded me of a marshmallow. In addition, something about this treat, probably the way the chocolate cookie wafer freeze dries, didn't remind me as much of ice cream as the plain freeze dried ice cream did. It was almost like some weird marshmallow-y ice cream-y candy bar. An enjoyable, but strange candy ba...

Remember my last post about Talenti where I was like, "I really want to try their Double Dark Chocolate gelato herpaderapdo"? Well I was an idiot and I'd forgotten the second pint of Talenti I'd bought from the sale at John's Grocery was, in fact, Double Dark Chocolate. So there you go. Again, the description on the Talenti website of this flavor is totally fabulous. It reads Dark chocolate gelato blended with semisweet Belgian Callebaut chocolate morsels and just a tish of vermouth. Is it possible to have a crush on a frozen dessert? I don't even know what a "tish" is. Google doesn't even know what a "tish" is. I don't even care what a tish is. What I want to ask is, however, is it possible to have a crush of a frozen dessert description writer? Well, now we've gotten that awkwardness out of the way, gelato. Oh boy this gelato. I'm going to warn you know, if I sound like a pompous wine connoisseur, I'm sorry. Wa...

This past weekend I had the exciting opportunity to visit the Iowa State Fair. For those of you not familiar with Iowa, this is exciting for a couple of reasons. One, Iowa has a legitimate state fair with crazy foods on a stick and music and beer and butter sculptures and animals and giant vegetables (unlike the Missouri State fair, which unless you know something about showing livestock, is kind of lame). Two, presidential candidates like to hang out at the Iowa State Fair, because Iowa. So of course, I jumped on my opportunity to go. Sadly, I did not see any presidential candidates I was too excited about: Bernie Sanders, Hilary Clinton, or Donald Trump (because seeing his toupee in person is an event in and of itself). But I did see Chris Christie, kind of cool, and two other Republican candidates who I didn't know well. But one of them was super passionate about Radical Islam and spicy chicken sandwiches sooo yeah. I was able to peruse most of the state fair offerings befor...

Today's review is something completely different: an ice cream scoop! Lizzy got me a super fancy ice cream scoop for my birthday because, at this point in our lives, of course we buy each other ice cream related presents.  I got the scoop earlier this summer when I visited home, but I didn't want to risk taking it through airport security.  TSA probably would have let it through no problem, but I just didn't want to risk it.  It is, after all, a rather large and heavy chunk of metal.  Instead, I had my parents mail it to me.  I got it in the mail a few weeks ago and have spent those few weeks alternating between this scoop and my old scoop to observe the differences. So what is this mystical new product? It's a  Midnight Scoop  ice cream scoop.  Why is it awesome?  Per the website, the main attraction is that it makes it easier to scoop hard ice cream by allowing you to use your stronger arm muscles to push the scoop through the ice crea...

The Edy's Frozen Custard line was an exciting concept at first; a mainstream brand doing frozen custard! The execution was kind of ho-hum with some high notes and some low notes.  The Chocolate Malt was flat-out disgusting, the Mint Cookies and Cream was decent, and the Peanut Butter Pie was pretty good.  I've seen the Snickerdoodle flavor around, but it wasn't exciting enough for me to risk wasting money on a bad flavor.  So why did I pick up the Strawberry Shortcake?  Two reasons.  One, I have never heard of this flavor. I saw it at Wal-Mart and was intrigued. It is not listed on Edy's website.  Is it a Wal-Mart exclusive? Where did it come from? Am I living in a parallel universe? Two, Lizzy got me a fancy-schmancy ice cream scooper for my birthday and I wanted something really thick to scoop to test it out. This flavor was good, but didn't taste at all like strawberry shortcake to me. The base had a mild, sweet strawberry flavor.  The main st...

Last week my roommate informed me a grocery store in downtown Iowa City, John's Grocery, was having a sale on Talenti Gelato. Obviously I made my way over to check it out.  This grocery store was quite teeny tiny, and they didn't have the biggest Talenti selection; however, they had a couple of flavors I haven't tried before. One of the flavors was obviously Fudge Brownie. Also, the sale was pretty good, I got two pints of Talenti Gelato for $7! At other grocery stores you can pay between four and five dollars for Talenti. The description of this flavor on the website reads Brownies. There are real, gooey, perfect brownies blended into our extra-dark-chocolate gelato. Also, we added a swirl of rich, dark fudge because we're really into swirls of fudge right now. First, I want to hang out with the person who writes the descriptions of Talenti flavors. Something about the description strikes me as particularly hilarious. But you know, sometimes I also am reall...

I've been eating a lot of Blizzard's lately, but not reviewing them.  From here on out, I will try to actually review the DQ Blizzard's I eat.  On Saturday I stopped by for a Rolo Minis blizzard, the August blizzard of the month.  This is Caramel filled ROLO Minis mixed with caramel topping and creamy vanilla soft serve. Before I review this blizzard, I need to share the first sentence of the wikipedia entry for ROLO candies with you.  I don't think it's enough to just link the page because some of you won't read it.  Here goes: Rolo (pronounced "Row-low", referring to the rolled-style candy is a brand of truncated-cone-shaped or frustum-shaped chocolates with a caramel center, the shape resembling that of a inverted bucket or tub or a traditional lampshade.  Why? Just why? FRUSTUM? WE ALL KNOW WHAT ROLOs LOOK LIKE! Whoever wrote this was seriously freaking out about the shape of ROLO candies.  I mean, really, just one of those description...

Yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss! This gelato is amazing. If I had to pick only one ice cream or gelato to eat for the rest of my life this guy would definitely make the short-list of contenders.  Talenti Coffee Chocolate Chips is Bittersweet Dutch cocoa infused with Italian espresso? You can just call us the diplomats of deliciousness. What makes this gelato so amazing? 1.  The texture. It epitomizes everything I imagine when I imagine the perfect gelato texture.  It is thick and smooth and dense.  It is slicker and more custard-y than ice cream, but not oily or fatty.  Just perfection. 2. The coffee.  Really they should name this Espresso Chocolate Chip. I ate this before reading the description and was blown away by the coffee flavor.  It tasted like a rich, deep, full, smooth dark roast like the best espresso you've ever had.  It was delicately sweetened juuuuuuust to the level that's appropriate for gelato. ...

Heyn's, you're killing it. I am definitely on pace to try every Heyn's flavor before I finish at Iowa and of the four flavors I have tried so far, I love every single one. All four are definitely going to get serious consideration for various superlatives when Madeline and I do our end of the year post for 2015. Obviously, the last ice cream Brett and I had before he left had to be a trip to Heyn's. Once again, I picked two crazy, chunky, desserty flavors, because they looked too good to pass up. The two I chose were Kara's Creation and Heavenly Hazelnut. I actually got pictures of the adorable hand drawn flavor signs this time! Kara's Creation is described as Vanilla ice cream, pralines, Oreos, and swirls of caramel. There was no description of Heavenly Hazelnut at the shop, but on the website it is described as Hazelnut ice cream, swirls of mocha fudge, coffee-flavored toffee pieces, and chocolate chunks . Gosh, where do I even start with eithe...

This past weekend, while Brett was visiting, we visited our friends who now live in Madison, Wisconsin. Wisconsin is known as "America's Dairyland" so I was pretty pumped to get some ice cream while visiting. On Sunday, we walked around the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus and discovered an ice cream shop, Babcock Ice Cream. Babcock Dairy is the University's dairy plant and they make ice cream, milk, cheese, and tea. I don't know what tea has to do with anything, but there ya go. Perks of going to a big public university in Wisconsin? There is a sweet ice cream shop with a ton of flavors right on campus. I guess I made the wrong choice going to Wash U. There were lots of flavors offered which sounded tasty to me, but I decided on Pineapple Cake, to try something unlike anything I have reviewed before, and Cookie Dough to go for something classic. The Pineapple Cake flavor is described as Pineapple pieces swirled with white cake batter and vanilla ice...

From my last Haagen-Dazs coupon I used with Brett, this is my pick. I've seen it a lot in stores and thought about getting it, but until now, I hadn't worked up the nerve. The design on the package of this flavor makes it look intense. The description of this flavor is Lemon gelato blended with vodka . For those of you who don't know (like me, Mom and Dad, I don't know anything about alcohol, because I don't drink it! *winkwink*), limoncello is a lemon liqueur made by steeping lemon zest in a rectified spirit (a neutral flavored spirit, example Everclear) until the oil is released.  Then you mix it with simple syrup, more or less if you want more or less sweetness. It is also, apparently, pretty easy to make at home. Technically vodka isn't a rectified spirit, but we'll let this one slide, Haagen-Dazs. And in reality, because a Wikipedia definition says something is made in a certain way doesn't mean it can't be made in any other way. ...

This is going to be a short and sweet review. I picked up this pint with the last of my Haagen-Dazs coupons while Brett was visiting. The $1 off two pints coupon is perfect for when Brett is visiting, because we each get to pick out a pint. This was Brett's pick. My pick was the Haagen-Dazs Limoncello Gelato. We ate this after going out to eat one night when we weren't totally in the mood for lemon gelato. Quite obviously, this is chocolate ice cream with chocolate chips. I've already reviewed Haagen-Dazs chocolate base here . I don't have more to say about it than I said already, but I will quickly sum up. Haagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream is pretty middle of the road in chocolate flavor. It is delicious, but it hits middle of the road on the milkiness/chocolate density scale. The "flavor notes" printed on the side of the pint telling you there are smokey notes in the ice cream are, in my opinion, a lie. The only difference between this pint a...