The Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog

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...

I'm not dead! I've been pretty uninspired to blog the past few weeks, and additionally I've been making my way through a gigantic container of homemade blackberry ginger trifle ice cream so I didn't have the fear of getting behind in reviews to motivate me. BUT, I'm back now with a review of Coolhaus Chocolate Molten Cake, dark chocolate ice cream with chewy cake pieces and fudge frosting swirl. Even if you don't consciously realize it,  if you are a native English speaker, you probably put your adjectives in a certain order, and I just cannot wrap my poor brain around the choice to say 'chocolate molten cake' instead of 'molten chocolate cake.' I get that Coolhaus is trying to describe a molten cake that happens to be chocolate, but it just sounds so wrong!!! Basically the anti-Halo Top Despite the odd name, Chocolate Molten Cake thankfully doesn't suffer from Coolhaus' usual problem of too-small mix-ins.  The dark chocolat...

Prepare your body and soul for SO MANY MOAR Coolhaus reviews! Today I have Milkshake & Fries, salted Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream with shoestring french fries and milk chocolate malt balls. Confession. I have never been a fan of dipping french fries in milkshake. I don't dislike  it, I just don't get it. Intellectually, I get why people like the hot/cold sweet/salty combination, but to me it just tastes like a fry .... and some milkshake. The total is not more than the sum of its parts. Despite, this I think french fries in ice cream could work really well. I recently reviewed Coolhaus' salted Tahitian vanilla bean base in my review of  Campfire S'mores . It's nearly perfect. It's a strong but not overpowering vanilla flavor and the salt helps to emphasize the sweetness of the base. In that review, I also brought up Coolhaus' propensity towards smaller mix-ins meant to blend with the base, as opposed to Ben and Jerry's-style chunktastic...

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...

S'mores is the flavor of summer! At the beginning of May I raced (and won! - it was a very small race) a 10K in White Bear Lake, a northern suburb/exurb of Minneapolis. As I was on my way home, I spotted Fresh Thyme Farmer's Market. A new location just opened up very close to the University of Minnesota, and I'd been meaning to go, especially after I heard from David at  David's Ice Cream Reviews  that they carry Coolhaus! He was not kidding! They had so many flavors! I limited myself to a few pints and a few ice cream sandwiches, but made sure to pick up the summery-sounding Campfire S'mores - S alted Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream, graham cracker cookie butter marshmallow swirl, dark chocolate squares. Since I haven't reviewed much Coolhaus in the past, I want to get something out right up front: I didn't like this flavor that much, but that doesn't reflect my opinions on Coolhaus as a brand. Their ice cream sandwiches are great and they have...

If you're into ice cream and follow other bloggers, then you've definitely heard about Coolhaus ice cream sandwiches with their architecture-inspired names. They're not sold in too many places in the Mid-West, but I recently found some at Tim and Tom's, a local corner market. Seriously, I want to give the person in charge of dairy purchasing the biggest hug; they almost always have a new brand or rare flavor to try. The Mintimalism (inspired, of course, by minimalism ) is Dirty Mint Chip ice cream with Double Chocolate cookies.  Mint is one of my favorite flavors, and I'm super picky about it. Alone, I would rate both the cookies and the ice cream, particularly the ice cream, 🍦🍦🍦🍦/4, but I didn't quite love the way the two elements came together. It's hard to mess up double chocolate cookies, and Coolhaus definitely went a few steps above 'not messing up.' The cookie were soft and had a deep chocolate flavor, and the chocolate chips ...