The Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog

PEPPERMINT IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON.  There are even carols about it.  Take, for example, the Irving Berlin classic "I'm Dreaming of a White (Chocolate Peppermint Bark) Christmas." The grocery stores in Minneapolis do not seem to fully appreciate the importance of seasonal peppermint flavors.  Christmas, the traditional peak of peppermint season, has past with nary a pint of peppermint ice cream in sight. Lizzy and I are currently home in St. Louis for the holidays, and luckily our dad had the next best thing, Prairie Farms Mint Moose Tracks ice cream.  There's not an official description, but it is a mint base with thick swirls of Moose Tracks fudge and chocolate mint cups. Prairie Farms (I keep wanting to type Purina Farms, which is a different thing entirely) is a generally solid brand of premium ice cream so I was expecting to like but not love this ice cream, and boy was I wrong! This moved into my top three favorite mint flavors of all time. The ...

Yeah, so, okay, sometimes you need an ice cream bar with 'chocolate' in the name twice.  Luckily Haagen-Dazs is there to deliver with their Chocolate Dark Chocolate Almond bars, described as Milk chocolate ice cream swirled with ribbons of fudge, coated in fine dark chocolate and perfectly roasted almonds. Why did I need double-chocolate ice cream bars? Because, for the first time in my life, I was an utterly terrible student. I was taking a class to fulfill a requirement, and I JUST DID NOT CARE about the subject material. About half-way through the semester I stopped paying attention in class and only turned in about half the homework.  Additionally, I totally half-assed the final project. I did okay on the midterm and the final, but was still really worried about my grade. I was wallowing in self-pity about this completely self-imposed problem and decided I needed super-duper chocolate ice cream treats. SELF-PITY! The Chocolate Dark Chocolate Almond bars were incr...

Now that finals week is over, it's time to review the ice cream I stress ate while writing all of my papers. Talenti always makes me feel better, so I picked up this pint of gelato I hadn't tried yet, Coconut Almond Chocolate. Usually the writer of the Talenti flavor descriptions makes me laugh out loud, but the description of this flavor is pretty normal. This new flavor is like if Caribbean Coconut Talenti took its best friends on vacation. Coconut shreds, semi-sweet chocolatey flakes, and salted roasted almonds make quite a party.  Now, the Talenti flavor descriptions are not printed on the packaging, so I usually do not read them before scooping the pint. And the first thing I have to say about this flavor is texture! Lots of texture! There were tons of chocolate flakes. They were thin and tad crunchy and a bit dark in flavor. About every other bite there was a large chunk of roasted almond. Some were even whole almonds. They had just a bit of salt, which helpe...

It's just a flesh wound! Aka, finals clearly beat me and Madeline up pretty hard, but we barely didn't die. Now prepare for an onslaught of catch up posts over the next few days. Quite a while ago I tried this Blue Bunny flavor, and in the car driving home to St. Louis, I discovered Madeline tried it recently, as well. So we decided to write a joint review. Many moons ago, two years ago, to be exact, I had the best cookie dough flavor I ever had in my life. The flavor was 2nd Street Creamery's Can't Tell Me No! Cookie Dough. This pint had cookie dough flavored ice cream, a cookie dough swirl, and two kinds of cookie dough chunks. Not long after I discovered this brand, 2nd Street Creamery went out of business. I died a little on the inside because I would never have this cookie dough flavor again, which I think I will say is my favorite ice cream ever. Tears. (Madeline's note: I'm still in mourning for 2nd Street Creamery. The ice cream gods are cruel and...

Dearest Readers, I'm sure you all were incredibly devastated the last few weeks when Madeline and I weren't posting much because you wanted to know about all of the winter season flavors. Delightful peppermints, scrumptious holiday cookies, lovely hot cocoa flavors. Unfortunately, it was not only finals that kept you from reading about winter flavors. My HyVee hardly had any winter flavors stocked! Grants I'm sure I could have simply driven across town to one of the other HyVees and found plenty of winter goodness, but I'm lazy. However, there was one local Iowa winter treat on the shelves of my grocery store, the Whitey's Mint Chipper ice cream sandwich. This treat is described as A delicious blend of Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream between two homemade chocolate cookies! Starting out, the mint chocolate chip ice cream was pretty standard. It was strongly mint flavor, but distinctly mint extract, not leaf. However, I wasn't expecting anything differen...

THE SEMESTER IS FINALLY OVER! Finally. It was just one thing after another since the beginning of September with an extra serving of crap at the end, and it's all finally done!  For me, that means back to blogging more regularly and generally being an actual, real, functioning human person. Talenti's Belgian Milk gelato is my first foray back into the blogging world.  Belgian Milk Chocolate is Hand-melted, imported Belgian milk chocolate blended until smooth with fresh milk, cream, eggs and a hint of vanilla. It's totally acceptable for you to become best friends with this pint. What even is hand-melted chocolate.  I can't help but imagine very sticky factory workers rolling big balls of chocolate between their palms.  I'm sure it really means that they have someone supervising and stirring a big vat of chocolate, but the image was too hilarious to keep to myself. I would describe Belgian Milk Chocolate as a chocolate and sugar gelato.  As a dark...

For Thanksgiving break, Madeline and I visited our family that lives outside of Syracuse, NY. Other than all the fun of seeing family, we were quite excited to go to some local ice cream shops, as Madeline had never really gotten a good taste of the ice cream scene in the area. A lot of the shops around were closed for the season, but luckily Arctic Island, which has delicious ice cream, is open all year long! We went to get ice cream on Black Friday. I usually try to resist the onslaught of season flavors until the last second (they always overwhelm me), but it is now officially peppermint season, there is no denying it. I also would actually be down with it being peppermint season all year long, which I can not say about the flavors of other seasons (I'm looking at you pumpkin). Thus, I decided to start the holiday season with some Peppermint Candy ice cream! One note before I describe the flavor, this ice cream shop is a great  value. That is a small cup. Look how much ...

Look at me. I'm finally with it. Super hip. Up on all the new exclusive ice cream flavors. Just kidding. Madeline is the most hip ice cream cat around and found the new Ben & Jerry's Wal-Mart exclusive flavor before I even had it on my to-buy list. But to be honest, nobody in the ice cream world was too excited about Confetti Cake. Why? Just read on my friends. This flavor is described as Vanilla Cake Batter Ice Cream with Sprinkles, Cake Pieces & Vanilla Frosting Swirls.  Sound familiar? It should. This flavor is incredibly similar to the incredibly popular, limited-edition Ben & Jerry's flavor Cake My Day, which came out this past spring. Basically Confetti Cake is Cake My Day minus the raspberry swirl and plus sprinkles. Or a combination of Cake My Day and Cotton Candy, another Wal-Mart exclusive. Now if you recall, Madeline and I both loved Cake My Day. In fact I gave it 4/4 cones! (Madeline reviewed it before we had the cone system in place.) So I...

Wheeee, November is nearly half-way over and I've barely posted any reviews! Grad school ate my liiiiffffeeee! I recently discovered New Barn AlmondCreme, an almond milk-based frozen dessert.  I tried  Cereal and Almond Milk  and wasn't too impressed, but absolutely loved  Sunflower Butter .  I decided I would try Ginger Snap Cookie next because ginger is the best and ginger snaps are especially the best.  New Barn describes Ginger Snap Cookie as Our friends at the amazing Rubicon Bakery in Richmond, CA bake us the most delicious gingersnap cookies which are then crumbled and swirled into each carton. If you're a fan of cookies, we've got you covered. Ginger Snap Cookie was basically a plain almond base with gingersnap cookies mixed in. Individually, each element was great, but that didn't quite translate into a great combination. I really like the flavor of New Barn's almond milk base. It has the natural sweetness of almonds, but isn't overly sw...

So this past spring a bunch of ice cream companies released a bunch of new flavors, including the Destination Series from Haagen-Dazs. At the time I was working through a bunch of free ice cream I'd gotten and just became too overwhelmed to really try to tackle many of those new flavors. Now I'm still feeling a bit overwhelmed about all the flavors I haven't tried, but better late than never! This flavor is described as In this Asian-inspired recipe, we collaborated with the small batch artisans at Morning Glory Confections and blended toasted sesame ice cream with the delightful crunch of honey cardamom sesame brittle pieces. The result is a uniquely delicate indulgence with a sweet, clean, and perfectly balanced flavor.  Thank goodness somebody finally made a sesame ice cream flavor. Sesame brittle is one of my favorite kinds of brittle. Maybe. I actually really like brittle of all kinds. But for real, Haagen-Dazs is really adding something interesting to the ...

This past weekend Madeline ran a lickety split fast half marathon and I was lucky enough to run it with her. To be precise, her time was 1:40:37! My sister is cooler than your sister. (Madeline's note: my sister is cooler and faster than your sister, her half PR is 1:23:52!) We ran the half marathon in Indianapolis, which is a city neither of us had really visited before. The day before the race we obviously checked out some of the best ice cream in the city. Lick was started in 2010 by two sisters, and they call themselves the "anti-Ben & Jerry's." Lick was in the middle of a weird industrial complex/studio space building down a long windy hallway. They sell mostly at farmers markets and make funky, unique, local, and dare I say, artisanal flavors? They also have a small brick and mortar store front attached to where they produce the ice cream, which is where we tried their flavors on Friday. Lick had nifty-neato carpet for super hip picture taking....

If Lizzy and I ever opened an ice cream shop, we would be well-covered in terms of flavor variety.  Lizzy is a fan of the 'kid' flavors packed with mix-ins and chocolate ridiculousness, and I am a fan of the weirdest possible flavor combinations you can put into ice creams. We would definitely categorize Jeni's Goat Cheese with Red Cherries as a 'Madeline flavor.' While goat cheese and cherries isn't necessarily a weird flavor combination, it's certainly not often seen in ice cream form.  The pint has Mackenzie Creamery goat cheese and roasted, sweet-tart, bright-red cherries. Mouthwatering and rich, it's like a scoopable cherry cheesecake. Confession. Jeni's became popular just before the current ice cream boom (I think we're in an ice cream boom right now, come at me) and I didn't get it. There were only two flavors available at my grocery store, and I thought the one I tried, Darkest Chocolate, was dry and weird and way too expe...

Guys. I liked speculoos cookies before they were cool, okay. I liked speculoos cookies before I even really knew what they were, and just knew them as the cookies you got on Delta flights.  Then Trader Joe's came along and made Speculoos Cookie Butter (which, btw, you can get Biscoff spread for way cheaper and it's the same thing).  Then Ben and Jerry's came along and made Spectacular Speculoos, their speculoos cookie core ice cream.  Now everybody and their uncle is on the speculoos train! And, you know what, I'm not even mad. MORE SPECULOOS FOR EVERYONE! If you don't know what speculoos (sometimes English-ized as speculaas) is, you've probably been living under a rock and it's now time to emerge. Speculoos are a thin, buttery, crunchy, delicate shortbread cookie spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg. Sam's Choice Cookie Butter ice cream is based on speculoos cookies though they don't state that explicitly.  The ice cream is Vanilla ice cream with ...

I tried my first of the revamped Blue Bunny flavors not long ago. I was impressed and decided to try some more. It is also that time of the semester where I don't have a ton of time to commit to blogging, so I bought a big container of Blue Bunny I could work on for a while before getting around to a review. As a lover of red velvet cake who is frequently disappointed with red velvet ice cream, I knew I had to buy the Blue Bunny Red Velvet Cupcake. This flavor is described as Red velvet ice cream, cream cheese flavored ice cream, red velvet cake pieces . So first, why is this ice cream called Red Velvet Cupcake and not just Red Velvet Cake? I think if I had the answer to that question I would have a lot less anxiety in my life. Regardless of the name, this was good ice cream. The red velvet ice cream was definitely stronger than the cream cheese ice cream. It was a very rich cake flavor. My major complaint with other red velvet flavor is that the cream cheese takes th...

Whew, I've been reviewing a lot of Talenti flavors recently! I discovered that Kowalski's, a pretty hoity-toity grocery store, carries a bunch of Talenti flavors that my grocery store doesn't have.  Raspberries and Cream is the last of three pints I bought there. Talenti says: We did it! We made tart and creamy happen at the same time by blending our sweet cream gelato with fresh raspberries, vanilla, balsamic vinaigrette and a delicious raspberry swirl. I have a ~complicated~ history with milk.  Growing up, we always had skim milk, and my parents made my sister and I drink a glass of milk every night with dinner.  I hated it. I hated drinking that stupid glass of skim milk.  Looking back, this was probably 50% because I didn't like the taste of milk and 50% because I was stubborn about everything and didn't want to do something just because my parents wanted me to. Today I like milk a little better. I actually prefer whole milk, and will someti...