The Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog

Hooray for the Upper Midwest! Sanders Fine Chocolatiers is a Michigan-based company. Their ice cream is available in scoop shops - located mostly near Detroit with one shop on Mackinac Island - and several retail locations. On a recent trip to Tim and Tom's Speedy Market I picked up a container of Lemon Twis-Tea, refreshing lemon and green tea flavored ice cream with candy lemon bits. I laughed a little when I saw the word 'refreshing' in the description. I don't usually think of ice cream as refreshing. It always makes me too thirsty. If I want something refreshing I go for a fruity sorbet. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised. This ice cream was surprisingly refreshing. I would go so far as to call it the perfect summer ice cream. I love the vintage-y packaging design! The base was lightly flavored, but this actually worked to the ice cream's advantage. Many lemon ice creams either go for a sweet or strong lemon flavor to mimic a lemon bar, but San...

Vice Cream has finally hit the Upper Midwest! You've probably seen it on all of those ~coastal~ ice cream blogs and instagram accounts, but I don't care, I'm still going to make you read about it again! When I first saw this at my local Cub there were two flavors available and I decided to pick up Breakfast in Bed, maple ice cream, sticky bun dough, pecan praline, maple syrup and cinnamon cream cheese ripple . Does it sound like there was a lot going on? There was a lot going on. I loved the base. The combination of the dairy and maple syrup reminded me of Waffle Crips cereal. The maple flavor was very sweet, but there was another underlying flavor adding some fullness and richness to tone down the sweet maple. After reading the ingredients, I believe this additional flavor to be vanilla. The ingredients list vanilla ice cream, and then further down list maple flavoring. I've never thought to combine vanilla and maple before, but I'm a fan. The sticky bun...

Sooooooooo, even thought Talenti is primarily a gelato company, I think that, on average, their sorbetto is head and shoulders above their gelato. They have some pretty great gelatos, but I've thoroughly enjoyed  every  sorbetto I've tried. Talenti has this to say about their new Cold Brew Sorbetto: Fair-trade Brazilian and Colombian cold-brew coffee is blended with everything but the milk to create our Cold Brew Coffee Sorbetto.  This sorbetto was so creamy, I was SHOCKED that it was dairy-free, so I immediately checked out the ingredients. Cold Brew Coffee Sorbetto includes egg yolks, whole eggs, coconut oil, and almonds. I think the eggs probably give it a slightly stiffer, creamier texture than you normally expect from a sorbet and the coconut oil and almonds add some richness you normally get from milk and cream. True to cold-brewed coffee, the coffee flavor was intense and pure without any acidity, and there was no dairy flavor to cloud or cover cof...

Reason number five hundred and eleventy trillion why I hate grad school: the end of the semester was predictably hectic, but now the semester is over and I'm BUSIER. THAN. EVER. I have a summer internship starting June 4, and my advisor and I are trying to finish a paper before then, so I've been swamped with work. I definitely blame it on grad school sucking and not on lack-luster time management skills. I finished my pint of Ben and Jerry's Gimme S'more! over a month ago, but I'm just now getting around to writing a review due to the aforementioned busyness that is in no way, shape, or form of my own making. Gimme S'more! has toasted marshmallow ice cream with chocolate cookie swirls, graham cracker swirls, and fudge flakes. Did I enjoy this ice cream? Yes. Was it what it professed to be? No. Did it remind me of a S'more? No. The toasted marshmallow base did not read as toasted marshmallow to me. I didn't get the soft hints of vanilla you typ...

Fun things are fun and I'm a total sucker for fun things that are fun! I didn't actually buy a Unicorn Frappuccino when Starbucks introduced them last year because the baristas at the Starbucks close to me on campus always seem slightly overwhelmed, so I generally try to avoid adding to their mounting panic. However, as soon as Target released their new Unicorn Magic flavor which is CLEARLY inspired by the Starbucks Unicorn Frap I was on the lookout for it. I FINALLY found it. Unicorn Magic is Pink fruity ice cream with a sour blue raspberry swirl, frosting swirl, and glitter candy bits. I love how the description just calls the base 'pink fruity ice cream.' Seriously, which fruits though?! I think there was probably some cherry in there as well as some floral notes because taking a whiff of it reminded me of sampling the Bath and Bodyworks Cherry Blossom lotion at the mall as a tween. Do people still go to malls? It was THE cool thing to do when I was in middl...

The last (and best!) of the new, non-non-dairy Haagen-Dazs TRIOs! Vanilla Caramel White Chocolate is layers of vanilla and caramel ice cream with crunchy white chocolate and sweet caramel sauce. I would argue that decadent, non-chocolate flavors are Haagen-Dazs' forte. In particular, they do white chocolate and caramel very well. White Chocolate Raspberry and Caramel Cone are my two favorite core Haagen-Dazs flavors with Dulce de Leche a close third. Vanilla Caramel White Chocolate combines these, so it's bound to be good. The caramel and vanilla ice creams are both very lightly flavored so the blend together into a single flavor that's a bit warmer and more complex than a plain vanilla and lighter and sweeter than a plain caramel base. The white chocolate is strongly flavored. (Well, as strongly flavored as a white chocolate can be.) It adds a rich, buttery element to to the light base, but doesn't overwhelm the flavor of the base. The caramel swirl ...

Haagen-Dazs is currently at the top of the grocery-store-ice-cream-brand-starts-making-non-dairy-ice-cream game. That is a very specific game with basically only two participants: Ben and Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs. All kidding aside, Haagen-Dazs' non-dairy ice creams, which they introduced last year, are actually quite tasty, and not just tasty-for-non-dairy-tasty. Boy, I'm really into hyphens today. This year, Haagen-Dazs introduced two non-dairy TRIO flavors. About Crunchy Peanut Butter, Haagen-Dazs says Layers of smooth peanut butter brimming with chocolate-covered peanuts are stacked between rich, velvety chocolate and sheets of crispy dark chocolate for a delightfully textured non-dairy experience. The peanut butter 'ice cream' has a nice, round, full texture.  (Cornstarch will do that!) It has a pretty strong peanut butter flavor with a nice balance between salty and sweet. The peanut butter flavor was strong enough that I could taste it against the c...