The Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog

FUN. That's my one word review of Coolhaus Birthday Cake Ice Cream Sammie, rainbow sprinkle cake cookie and cupcake frosting ice cream. Coolhaus started as an ice cream sandwich company and later expanded to produce pints. Their pint flavors are hit or miss for me, but I've never had an ice cream sandwich I didn't thoroughly enjoy. The Birthday Cake Sammie may not be for everyone - it's very sweet - but I loved it. The cookies are a basic sugar cookie, but with a perfect texture and plenty of sprinkles baked in. The cookies are thick, soft, and chewy, but don't get soggy. This means you don't have a mess on your hands (literally!) if the ice cream starts to melt. The sprinkles really took this to the next level. These were no weak-ass sprinkles! These were huge, sugary sprinkles, and the cookies were chock full of 'em! Honestly, I would eat these cookies alone. If you didn't get your sugar fix from the cookies, the cupcake frosting ice...

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...

Sometimes you purchase an ice cream exclusively for the name.  Well, maybe you don't, but I certainly do.  Case in point, I bought  Cedar Crest Pirate's Bounty  because I thought the name was Pirate's Booty and Cedar Crest was making a pun about butts. Tina Belcher is my spirit animal. The same thing happened with Sanders Fine Chocolatiers Bumpy Cake.  No reference to butts this time, but the fact that a type of cake is called 'Bumpy Cake' really tickled my funny bone and I knew I would be taking home a container. I have never heard of Bumpy Cake so I did some sleuthing.  Per Wikipedia, Bumpy Cake is chocolate cake with thick ridges of buttercream frosting covered in chocolate ganache invented by Fred Sanders (founder of Sanders Confectionery) in 1913.  If Fred Sanders wasn't dead, I think he and I would get along very well.  THICK RIDGES OF BUTTERCREAM FROSTING. Sauce: http://www.sanderscandy.com/Chocolate-Fudge-Bumpy-Cake-p/501...

Mocha Me Happy is the third and final in my series of Blue Bunny reviews. (But it's not the last Blue Bunny flavor I'll ever review!) I'll be honest, when I first spied this flavor I wasn't too excited about it, but I picked it up because I knew my boyfriend Kyle would like the flavor.  He's a fan of chocolate, chocolate peanut butter, coffee, and other ice creams of that ilk, and sometimes he gets a bit grumbly that I often buy ice cream that he doesn't like.  Every once in a while I make sure to pick up something I know he will eat.  It wasn't until I had some of the ice cream and went back to read the description that I got really excited about this flavor.  Mocha Me Hoppy is Coffee ice cream with hazelnut flavored mocha coffee swirl and cake pieces. The coffee base was very creamy and sweet, but this was appropriate as Blue Bunny is going for a mocha flavor rather than a coffee flavor here.  As with other Blue Bunny flavors, the base ice cr...

I must have been in a party mood at the grocery store because I picked up both Blue Bunny Peanut Butter Party (review  here ) and Blue Bunny Blu's Birthday Party. PARTY TIME! Blu's Birthday Party is Cake and frosting flavored ice cream with cake pieces and confetti shaped candies. My first impression of this ice cream is BLUE! The base is a really, really crazy bright blue. The batter flavor of the base was very good with maybe a hint of artificial sweetness, but the addition of frosting ice cream made the base way too sweet.  I think this flavor would have been way better with just a cake base.  As with peanut butter party, the base could have been denser, but was pretty on par with other Premium ice creams. The cake pieces were quite large, approximately one cubic inch (god, I'm such a nerd). I got one approximately every three bites, which was definitely enough due to their size.  So, I'm a five year old at heart and therefore anything with rainbow...

BLOGGER FAIL! Wow Madeline and I have been ice cream blogging for over two years now and neither of us have reviewed ANY Baskin Robbins flavors. Granted, we all know that Baskin Robbins is a giant chain that's not really at the forefront of ice cream innovations, but they are such a big player, they do deserve to be reviewed. Granted, I don't know if there is a Baskin Robbins around where I live now. However, this past Sunday I was in the Southwest Terminal of the St. Louis airport and just craving a treat. I decided to peek at the Baskin Robbins menu, just for shits and giggles. When I saw the Flavor of the Month was Oreo Birthday Cake, I thought that was pretty exciting and just had to get some! However, I can find nothing on the Baskin Robbins website about this flavor, so I make no promises that you will be able to find it at your BR location! There was also no description of this flavor, but to me it seemed like a chocolate base with Oreo cookie pieces, sprinkles, ...

Wow I have been slacking on the ice cream reviews. Partly because I spent this past weekend in Colorado for a wedding eating lots of pastries and cake and such and not ice cream. But mostly because finals just ate my soul and I didn't have time to review any ice cream. Luckily, when I was almost done with finals I had some time to go to Capanna gelato with my friend, Tarah, who is also really into desserts. She hadn't been there yet and it seemed like the perfect way to celebrate (almost) the end of the semester. This time I decided to get the Coconut flavor and a Cake Batter type flavor. It had some sort of interesting name, like Cake Mania Royale, or something, but I don't exactly remember, and I failed and didn't take a picture. Regardless, both flavors were good. The coconut was quite sweet and more cream tasting than other coconut frozen desserts I've had. There also seemed to be a hint of vanilla flavor in the coconut gelato. Lost of coconut flakes wer...

Once again, I'm totally behind. Madeline does such a good job at bringing you all the new flavors as they come out. But I'm always off in ice cream la la land (this time around ice cream la la land was reviewing the NOLA shipment) and it takes me a while to review new flavors. So for those of you that aren't already bored by Ben & Jerry's Cake My Day, read on. This limited batch flavor is described as Vanilla Cake Batter Ice Cream with Vanilla Cake Pieces, Buttercream Frosting & Raspberry Swirl, Now, like Madeline, I'm not the biggest fan of cake. Obviously my favorite dessert is ice cream, and after that it would have to be cookies, brownies, pie, cupcakes, then cake. Not that I would say no to a free piece of cake, but it is so easy for cake to be bad. Like bad cookies are still good, but bad cake is bad. However, lots of people were saying great things about this flavor, so I was stoked to try it. I'll start with the base. Vanilla c...

Our next New Orleans Ice Cream Co. review is Lemon Doberge Cake.  Now, we are not from New Orleans so had to do a bit of research into what a Doberge cake actually is.   Turns out it is a layer cake whose thin cake layers alternate with layers of pudding.  Ummmm, get at me Doberge! New Orleans Ice Cream Co.'s take on this cake is This twist on a New Orleans dessert classic has tangy lemon sauce and real lemon cake in our citrus lemon ice cream. Madeline's take: I always underestimate how well lemon and dairy go together, so a delicious lemon ice cream will always take me by surprise and New Orleans Ice Cream Co.'s Lemon Doberge is no exception.  The citrus lemon ice cream had a soft and sweet rather than sharp and tart lemon flavor.  The lemon sauce had a nice zing to it that worked really well to complement the lemon of the base.  Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of the sauce.  I could have done with about 5 times as much sauce in...

This semester is flying by at quite a terrifying rate. I can hardly believe it is already spring break, which has more to do with the fact I've done very little work on my final papers than anything else... However, I recently realized it was MARCH and I hadn't yet been to Heyn's this semester. But don't worry, I haven't fallen off the horse with respect to my goal to try every Heyn's flavor before I graduate. Last weekend, I got to check two more flavors off the list when I went to Heyn's with my friend, Tarah, a dessert lover who hadn't tried Heyn's yet! There were a lot of flavors I was thinking about, but Brownie Batter caught my eye, because it was advertised as a rotating special flavor. I'd better try it while I had the chance! Heyn's also has a cake batter flavor I've seen a few times and hadn't tried. I figured, go batter or go home. I was surprised that both of these flavors were plain base flavors. From what I...

I'm about a month late with this blog post. I ate this pint of ice cream only recently, but February 1st was Baked Alaska Day. Who knew that Baked Alaskas have their own day dedicated to them. I didn't, and next year I will have to celebrate it, seeing as I haven't ever had a Baked Alaska. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this crazy dessert, a Baked Alaska is sponge cake topped with ice cream, topped with meringue and baked in a very hot oven for just long enough to firm the meringue, but not long enough to melt the ice cream. Baked Alaskas can also be called Norwegian Omelettes, and were probably originally called Alaska Floridas by the chef who invented them. The turn-a-dessert-into-an-ice-cream-flaor motif is a common one, but New Orleans takes this to another level. I mean, everybody's got a cake flavor. Everybody's got a cookie flavor. Everybody's got a brownie flavor. But Moon Pies and now Baked Alaskas? I was super excited to try this ...

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 ...

Those of you from St. Louis reading this blog are probably going, "WTF?!?!?!" right about now. Jilly's cupcakes is the premier cupcake place in St. Louis...or Ladue... Their address says St. Louis, but they are close enough to Ladue and the prices of their cupcakes scream "We are catering to rich Ladue and Clayton residents that want to spend too much money on cupcakes!!!" We're talking ~$4.75 a pop. But then again, these babies might just be worth it (and for my Wash U readers, they take bear's bucks!). They are HUGE and the frosting is piled high. There is also some sort of filling, like creme, or jelly, or chocolate, or caramel, in the middle, too. Seriously, these things are great. In fact so great that Jilly's cupcakes won Food Network's Cupcake Wars TWICE! This is the Cuban Coffee cupcake. Description:  Cake: Coffee Chip -- Filling: Coffee Dulce de Leche -- Topping: Espresso Swirl Buttercream, Café con Leche Crunch, Sweet Cuban Coffee S...