The Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog

I've had this review queued up to post for a few days, but after the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots and protests, it felt frivolous to talk about ice cream in the midst of so much grief. I've talked about it on the blog before, but one of the big reasons I love ice cream is because it almost universally makes people HAPPY, and it feels like no one is happy right now. Instead of just posting a review without mentioning what's going on in the world, I'm hoping to make this a little bit of a fundraiser - donate $5 (the cost of a pint of ice cream) or more to  Black Visions Collective  (scroll to bottom of page for donation link),  Reclaim the Block , or  Northstar Health Collective . These three organizations are called out by  Minnesota Freedom Fund  as being in need of supplies and support. Or find and donate to your local Freedom Fund. I will match up to $500 in donations split evenly between the three organizations (will donate this amount r...

Really. A blog post. Literally 2 years to the day after the last blog post. (Srs, I did not plan that.) In that time I (Madeline) defended my thesis, so you can now call us Dr. Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog, thank you very much. So it's 2020. All through 2019 we joked that the year was a dumpster fire. Little did we know. We're in the midst of a global pandemic, Australia burned to the ground, March lasted 23 years, Kobe Bryant died, Donald Trump was not impeached, Megxit Megxited, my personal life is somewhat of a shit show, all of our mental health is a complete and total joke, so I decided now is the perfect time to write an ice cream blog post because ice cream is LITERALLY the only light left in the world. Ben and Jerry's Netflix and Chill'd came out at the beginning of the year, and I finally found it in Minneapolis. It is Peanut butter ice cream with sweet and salty pretzel swirls and fudge brownies. If you are not familiar with the term Netflix and Ch...

It one kind of fun to write reviews of products you really enjoy and an entirely different kind of fun to pan terrible products, but it is exactly zero kinds of fun to write a review of a product you didn't particularly like made by a brand you adore. I'M SORRY BB. Thelma's Treats has a new ice cream sandwich with one chocolate chip cookie, one double chocolate chip cookie and some strange marshmallow/graham ice cream. Thelma's was originally a cookie company, and their ice cream sandwiches use their cookies and Anderson Erickson ice cream. I thought the double dark chocolate cookie would outshine the regular chocolate chip cookie, but the combo actually worked quite well. The double chocolate cookie give this treat a ridiculous richness which was balanced by the lighter buttery/caramelized flavor of the the regular chocolate chip cookie. I cannot fault Thelma's at all for cookie execution. Unfortunately, the ice cream failed to live up to the cookies. Li...

Nana Banana, banana ice cream with salted caramel almond butter swirl, is the second of two flavors I picked up from the new Target x Museum of Ice Cream (MOIC) collab. You can get my general thought on the MOIC in my  review of Piñata , but to sum up, it irks me that the MOIC is not, in fact, a museum and yet calls themselves a museum. I was unimpressed with the quality of Piñata, and it's way too easy to make a bad banana ice cream, so my expectations for Nana Banana were quite low.  The quality of the base was not great. It had a noticeably low fat content and as a result was hard and icy and melted down into a runny liquid. Despite that, the banana flavor of the base was not bad. It could have been a bit stronger, but it tasted like real banana and not banana flavoring. The salted caramel almond butter swirl had huge potential. It had a strong taste of almond butter - the the more complex and almost floral taste of lightly roasted almonds. The salted caramel added...

The blog is not dead! Just my computer. My poor, old computer, that I bought in 2012, was felled by a drop of water several weeks ago, and I have finally acquired a new one. In Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog style, I will begin my first post back with a complaint. I do not like the Museum of Ice Cream (MOIC). It's not a museum. It's a building full of Instagram backdrops aka an 'experience-first brand' as they themselves claim. I'm not against the content of the MOIC, but for fuck's sake don't call yourself a museum. Museums are for learning and wonder and awe. They have a dot org website extension. I'm skeptical of the quality of a product produced by an 'experience-first' company, but I grabbed two flavors of the new Museum of Ice Cream pints available at Target. Not gonna lie, the containers are super cute, and that was 90% of the reason I bought them. Piñata is Vanilla ice cream with iced animal cookies, frosted cupcake bits, fizzy cotton...

Hi, my name is Madeline and I'm a mint snob. I just really love mint, and you can piss right off if you make a crummy mint product. Mint tea? It better be stuffed with fresh mint leaves not some speckles of dried mint leaf in a tea bag. Mojito? There better be mint all up in there, not just one lonely sprig as a garnish. Mint ice cream? It BETTER not be flavored with mint extract. I BETTER see pieces of real mint leaves. Coolhaus Dirty Mint Chip is my holy grail of mint ice cream. I first tried this ice cream as part of the  Mintimalism  ice cream sandwich and knew I had to get my hands on a pint of the stuff. Thanks to Fresh Thyme Farmer's Market I found a pint!!!!! This flavor is fresh mint leaf ice cream, brown sugar, dark chocolate chips. This is the best mint ice cream ever.  The sweet cream base is light, delicate, and milky which lets the mint shine through. And, oh my goodness, THE MINT. Coolhaus certainly did not skimp on mint leaves. You can see the bits...