The Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog

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...

Glampfire Trail Mix, chocolate ice cream with crunchy pretzel swirls, marshmallow swirls, and fudge-covered almonds , is Ben and Jerry's ode to glamping. What is glamping? Let the delightful Tom Haverford explain it to you: Glamping is basically camping with enough amenities that you're not ~inconvenienced~ by the great outdoors. Ben and Jerry's Glampfire Trail Mix is very aptly named. Trail mix is a great, calorie-dense snack for when you're out hiking all day. Glampfire Trail Mix is a great, calorie-dense snack for when you're in your Skymall-outfitted tent that is furnished with a freezer! I'm not typically a fan of Ben and Jerry's chocolate base, but I liked it here. I'm not sure if they've tweaked the recipe or if the mix-ins in Glampfire Trail Mix just complement the base very well. Whatever the cause, the chocolate base seems richer, darker, and creamier than I remember. The marshmallow swirl is fantastic, but is unfortunately ov...

When I tried  HEATH Klondike Bars  I thought FOR SURE no other Klondike bar could possibly top it, but I think Caramel Pretzel managed to do it! Klondike Caramel Pretzel is "Silky-smooth caramel ice cream complete with ribbons of caramel swirls - all covered in a thick chocolatey coating that's been loaded with pretzel pieces." I think the caramel-based Klondike bars are so good because they really help bring out the complex, roasted notes of the chocolate shell. The caramel swirl intensified the flavor of the caramel ice cream. I noticed the texture the pretzels added right away, but didn't immediately notice the taste; however, I think they  gave the bars a slight saltiness that helped sharpen the sweetness of the chocolate and caramel. As I ate a few more bars, I started to notice the actual taste of the pretzels, so it's there if you pay attention. I give these 🍦🍦🍦.5/4. Current rankings 1. Caramel Pretzel 2. HEATH 3. Brownie Fudge Sw...

Wowwowowowow. I have not posted in a long time. Weeks ago I was in Kansas City before Madeline and I embarked on our Katy Trail adventure. As a Missourian, I have wanted to go to Glacé artisan ice cream for a long time now, even though I still maintain that St. Louis is the superior Missouri city. Glacé was opened by Christopher Elbow who is also a renowned chocolatier. Glacé offered some unique flavors, as well as some classics. Curry Cashew on top and Salted Pretzel on bottom. After much deliberation, I picked Salted Pretzel and Curry Cashew. I have thought about how delicious a curry ice cream would be for a long time and I was pumped to try some. The Curry Cashew was awesome. It was spicy; not hot spicy, but flavorful spicy. The cream and the cashew added a fattiness and nuttiness to the flavor that rounded out the curry nicely. While the curry was flavorful and rich, it wasn't so strong that I couldn't taste the cream underneath or the cashew. And on that note, I...

If you are a religious reader of this blog, WHICH I AM SURE YOU ARE, you have noticed that Lizzy and I have not reviewed many of Talenti's new flavor and it's already half-way through the year!  I just haven't seen them anywhere.  Not at Cub. Not at Tim and Tom's. Not at Target.  Where are they?!  On one of my multiple trips to Wal-Mart in search of Ben and Jerry's Pecan Sticky Bun I finally found a few of the new Talenti flavors.  Today I have a review of Peanut Butter Pretzel. (Read Lizzy's review  here .) This flavor is 'life by peanut butter.' As in, you have not lived until you try this peanut butter gelato with real peanut butter ribbons and peanut butter covered pretzels.  And a little chocolate because why not? Hmmmmmmm. The peanut butter base had a really interesting flavor.  It was almost ..... malty?  Yes, the base tasted like malted peanut butter.  I can't really explain this because malt isn't listed in the ingredie...

Okay Dearest Readers, get ready for what may be one of the best posts of all time. Yesterday, I walked to Cold Stone with my friends and fellow Anthropology graduate students, Emma, Charlie, and Scott. We decided to get ice cream there because the Math graduate students at Iowa were holding a fundraiser! And what could be better than eating ice cream while supporting fellow graduate students? Nothing!  I decided to get the Not So Vanilla, a new Cold Stone Creation. And while you will see that this creation was absolutely delicious, it might have been a bit of a mistake to order it. You see, the math graduate students were making  the creations for the fundraiser. As they are not Cold Stone employees, they were having a hard enough time making all of the creations normally on the menu, and then I asked them to make a new one! They must have little descriptions of each creation posted behind the counter for employees to read, but they did not seem to have them for the new cre...

This post is a review of Talenti's Peanut Butter Pretzel aka my pre-pre-Boston Marathon ice cream. To have a good race (more on whether or not that happened in a later post), you shouldn't really change too much about your routine leading up to the big day. So yes, when Brett and I went grocery shopping, we picked up ice cream. I grabbed Talenti's Peanut Butter Pretzel because I haven't seen that flavor around any Iowa stores yet. My grocery stores have gotten all the new Ben & Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs flavors, finally, but not all of the new Talenti ones yet. This is the first of their new (I guess really only new-ish) flavors I'm reviewing! Also finally  I am getting to a new flavor before Madeline did. HA! Take that. This flavor is described as This flavor is "life by peanut butter." As in, you have not lived until you try this peanut butter gelato with real peanut butter ribbons and peanut butter covered pretzels. And a little chocolate be...

I've officially survived my first week of graduate school! However, since it was only the first week of classes, the professor for the course I'm TAing decided to cancel subsections and all of my three hour seminar classes did not go the full three hours. I had a lot more free time this week than I probably will ever have again in my academic life. So with all my free time, Sunday evening I decided to go get frozen yogurt from Cate's, a shop in North Iowa City. If you haven't figured it out by now, I have a whole system of 8 questions with which I review frozen yogurt shops. Here they are if you have forgotten. 1) The variety of flavors: is there a good selection? 2) The flavor of my choices. 3) The quality of the combination of my choices. 4) The texture of froyo. 5) The variety of the toppings. 6) Quality of the toppings. 7) How well my toppings coordinated with my froyo flavors 8) Overall experience 1) A resounding nope on this question. There wer...

So far, I have only had one experience with Edy's relatively new Frozen Custard line and this experience was incredibly negative. However, plenty of ice cream bloggers out there, including Madeline, who disliked the Chocolate Malt custard flavor have enjoyed other offerings from this Edy's line. I felt like this flavor was extra promising because of the salty sweet potentiality and its uniqueness! More ice cream companies should be making flavors with pretzels in them. The description of this flavor on the Edy's website reads A perfect combination of sweet cream frozen custard, chocolaty covered pretzel pieces and a generous swirl of salted caramel.  I'm sure at this point you all know I am so totally over it with salted caramel flavors. And you would probably not expect a flavor from Edy's  of all companies would get me to change my mind on this. Well, I loved this frozen custard. The main reason? The salted caramel wasn't the only salty componen...

Last Sunday I stood in the freezer section of my grocery store having a real first world problems meltdown moment.  I was getting really frustrated and pouting because sometimes it seems like the ice cream selection at my local grocery store sucks!  Not that it's really all that bad, it just takes them forever  to get anything new.  Like, I don't even think they have the cookie cores yet.  They have a horrible Talenti selection (which I really  don't understand because Talenti is based in Minneapolis).  Then I realized how ridiculous I was being.  So to turn my grumpy face around, I decided to pick up and review a pint of Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby, which is the ice cream flavor that truly sparked my ice cream enlightenment. Let me expound.  I have always loved ice cream, but until a certain point in my life I thought that ice cream was ice cream.  There was chocolate, and vanilla, and strawberry, and Neapolitan, cookie dough, etc...

Preface Yes, I am copying my sister in the format of this post. But it was too good to pass up, and the story of me and ice cream flavor really cannot be described in any way besides a SAGA. Introduction It's my turn, finally to review the amazing, limited-edition, Ben & Jerry's Candy Bar Pie. I first had this ice cream a while ago, like a WHOLE month ago, but just haven't had time to review it. In the mean time I think I have eaten like 3 or 4 pints of this ice cream. Mostly because they don't sell it in Eldon, so I had to drive 25 mins to the Lake of the Ozarks to buy this flavor. I decided to stock up when I bought it so I would have to drive to the Lake again too soon to buy more. But in reality, a 25 minute drive is nothing compared to the reality of what I have gone through to get this ice cream. Act I: Romance I have waited over a YEAR for this ice cream to come out in pints. Back in Spring of 2013, Candy Bar Pie hit the scoop shops. I had it at the...