The Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog

It seems like every year I get SO HYPED about new ice creams flavors and then I wait ... and wait ... and wait for them to hit shelves in the Midwest. It's mid-February for goodness sakes! So, instead of new flavors, I have a fall limited edition, Edy's Pumpkin Spice Latte. This flavor is coffee light ice cream swirled with pumpkin light ice cream. Honestly, I was not excited for this flavor (which is why I didn't pick it up in the fall). Edy's light ice creams have a tendency to be terrible, and this flavor sounded like it had the potential to be very bland. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by this flavor. It was a legitimately good ice cream. It was thick, creamy, and smooth which is rare for a light ice cream. The coffee and pumpkin ice creams were very similar in color, but were tightly swirled together so you always got some of both in each bite. The prominent flavor was the spices, particularly the cloves, and the coffee added a nice, milky finis...

It's the end of October and I haven't posted any reviews of pumpkin flavors!!!! Since I haven't been blogging as much this semester, I didn't want to re-review any pumpkin flavors I've already tried like Ben and Jerry's or Talenti's pumpkin flavors, so my choices were limited. On a whim, I picked up some Belmont Pumpkin Praline from Aldi's. Pumpkin Praline is pumpkin ice cream with cheese frosting swirls and praline pecans. Belmont is premium, rather than super premium ice cream, so higher overrun (airier) and less fat content than you may be used to if you typically stick to super premium brands like Haagen-Dazs, Ben and Jerry's or 'boutique' ice creams. This was evident in the texture, which was light and airy, but didn't decrease the impact of the flavor. The base achieved an exquisite balance between pumpkin and spice. The pumpkin flavor was very strong and actually tasted like pumpkin with just a hint of cinnamon and ...

Real talk.  It's more than a full week into October and my grocery store still has barely any fall ice creams.  I'm getting worried because winter ice cream season is right around the corner.  Did they just decide to skip fall flavors this year? This week Edy's Pumpkin Patch was literally  the only fall ice cream in the freezers so I decided to give it a try. This is in Edy's Slow Churned line which claims to have 1/2 the fat of other ice creams.  It clocks in at 90 calories and 1.5 grams of fat per serving.  I think the texture of Edy's slow churned ice creams is disgusting, and this was no different.  Corn syrup is listed as the third ingredient, and this definitely had the thick, goopy texture of corn syrup.  It was also somehow squishy, chewy, and slippery all at once.  Weird. In contrast to the off-putting texture, Pumpkin Patch had a great flavor.  Edy's blended pumpkin with clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger.  ...

I'm going to start this review by letting you all, Dearest Readers, know that I feel perfectly fine. I am not sick and I obviously have not keeled over and died. I was at HyVee the other day and found these ice cream sandwiches from Whitey's. I don't remember seeing them in my HyVee before then. They are, however, quite clearly a fall themed dessert. The description of this treat is A delicious SEASONAL blend of our famous pumpkin ice cream sandwiched between two Homemade Spice cookies!  (emphasis in original). I was, to say the least, a bit surprised to find these in stores in February. I was also excited. In my opinion, it is a bummer pumpkin is relegated to a seasonal dessert flavor. Pumpkin is great, and I would like to eat pumpkin ice cream all year long. I would even take simply being able to eat pumpkin all year long. A few days after purchasing this ice cream sandwich, I was trying to find some canned pumpkin to make pumpkin curry, and couldn't find any. W...

Not long ago, after connecting via Twitter, Madeline and Lizzy were sent the whole line up of SnoSpice products. You have probably never heard of SnoSpice and are quite confused and not exactly sure what this blog post is going to be about. That is because SnoSpice is an incredibly new company; new as of December 2015! According to their website, "SnoSpice is a collection of herb and spice blends that transform ordinary vanilla ice cream into an amazing array of flavors." The idea for the Atlanta company occurred after "a late night yearning for chocolate ice cream in a house with only vanilla." While this may be the ultimate first world problem, I've been there and it's rough. Now with SnoSpice, when you find your self in such a predicament you can turn vanilla ice cream into any of six flavors: Cocoa Cayenne, Cinnamon for Optimists, Pumpkin Carriage, Tumeric'd, Lemon + Basil, or Deep Chocolate Sea Salt. Pretty rad. Last night, with the purc...

Happy fall, happy pumpkins, happy leaves, happy turkey, happy ice cream! I realize it has been fall for a while now, but as the winter seasonal ice cream flavors are starting to creep into stores and temperatures are dropping even further, I'm holding onto fall weather and fall flavors for dear life. In addition to tasty flavors, fall means being slammed with school work. I've actually eaten quite a bit of this flavor before having time to get around to reviewing it. So here's what will probably be the last review of a fall ice cream flavor from Lizzy. This flavor tasted strongly of spices. The spices in this flavor were cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves. They're not showing up in this photo as well as I thought they would, but there were little flecks of various spices throughout the ice cream! However, the spices in this flavor did not over power the pumpkin flavor. Unlike so many pumpkin desserts out on the market, this ice cream actually t...

This post is sort of a reader request, minus the reader part. Maybe. It would be super exciting if ther person were now a reader of this blog! Not too long ago, I was getting my hair cut and I noticed my hair dresser had a tattoo of a cupcake on her arm, so I asked her about it. She talked my ear off about cupcakes for the next 10 minutes and apologized. She was like, wow I could talk about cupcakes and desserts all day, but most people stop caring after the first 2 minutes. I was like, girl, I understand your struggle. I write an ice cream blog, talking about ice cream way longer than my listener would like me to is the story of my life. By the end of the hair cut, she recommended I check out Ghurtie's Frozen Yoghurt in Coralville. Ghurtie's a bit of a drive from my house, so it would need to be quite good for me to make it a regular event. So how does it stack up? I'll use my 8-step froyo shop evaluation process to find out. 1) The variety of the flavors: is there a g...

Oh, Sweet Science, why do you insist on making the world a better place by making such delicious ice cream?  Because when the zombie apocalypse comes we'll just be that much sadder that we can't eat your ice cream.  Waaaaaaahhhhhhhhh! I worry a lot about a zombie invasion, specifically about the ice cream situation that would ensue. Continuing their tradition of splendiferous seasonal flavors, Sweet Science is offering Pumpkin Five Spice this fall.  Their description is Roasted pumpkin is combined with honey and five spice powder - as close to pumpkin pie as you can get. So I didn't realize five-spice powder is an actual and spent all the time I was eating the ice cream I was trying to guess what the five spices were.  I came up with cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, anise and ......  I got some and was way off on others.  Apparently five-spice powder is actually made with cinnamon, anise, fennel, Szechuan peppercorn, and cloves. This was definitely the...

Okay, fine. I'll admit it. It is fall.  I was trying to avoid admitting it, but I can't any longer. But plz lets not talk about winter yet. Now, I know I sound a bit curmudgeony. However, I do not dislike fall. In fact, I think fall is great. Perfect running weather, sweaters, beautiful foliage, an excuse to use the word foliage. Fall is wonderful.   However , what I don't like is this new craze as of the last 5 years or so where people have become extra obsessed with fall. And I don't even mind all of the social media googoogaga-ness about fall. What bugs me is this: (1) Other seasons are fun, too and (2) where was all of this love for fall 10 years ago? Fall as been around for a while, and I feel bad it hasn't gotten this kind of love until recently. Like, do you only love fall because some white dude finally figured out pumpkin and spice taste great in many forms? Which by the way many other peoples have had figure out for a while now . (Sorry, not sorry my blog ...

If you remember way back in August, I vowed to review every Dairy Queen Blizzard of the Month Flavor.  And yet .... and yet I didn't review the September flavor.  You might think I broke my promise, but you would be wrong.  Pumpkin Pie was the flavor for both September and October, so I decided to wait October to try it.  October feels more like fall, and it's more fun to eat pumpkin when it feels like fall. Holy Cow.  If you only eat one pumpkin-themed item this fall, put this blizzard on the short list.  It was amazing.  This blizzard is described as Pumpkin pie pieces blended with creamy vanilla soft serve, crowned with whipped topping and nutmeg. This description is totally wrong.  It's more like pumpkin pie filling, unbaked, straight from the can, blended with vanilla soft serve with small pieces of crust-like graham-ish pieces mixed in.  Whatever.  The mis-matched description didn't take away from my enjoyment of th...

Alert! Alert! Alert! I have the first pumpkin flavor of the season! It's only half-way through September! Summer is not officially over! What is wrong with the world! I feel like summer and I have a kind of 'Rose and Jack from Titanic' thing going on right now: Summer/Rose: Don't worry, I'll never let you go! Me/Jack: Oh, thank fuck! Summer/Rose: JK, bitches! Me/Jack.  Dammit.  I am now frozen to death. I mean, Kate Winslet, what a bitch.   Was anyone else obsessed with Leo when they were in 4th grade when Titanic came out? Although I'm currently having an "oh my god summer cannot possibly be over and school cannot possibly have started and fall products cannot possibly be on shelves" crisis/panic, my sadness is slightly mitigated because I love pumpkin-flavored things.  I just wish fall was not the only time to get them.  LONG LIVE SUMMER! Now that my little breakdown is over, I have a review of my first of (hopefully) many pumpkin-fl...

Where the heck are all of the seasonal pumpkin flavors this year?  I know they're out there.  I know Ben and Jerry’s made a Pumpkin Cheesecake flavor and Talenti made a Pumpkin Pie flavor, but they NEVR showed up at my local grocery store.  I mean COME ON.  I did, however, find Kemp’s Pumpkin Pie, a limited edition seasonal flavor. This was described as Pumpkin Ice cream swirled with real crust pieces. This ice cream was pretty good.  I didn’t realize until I got home that it was reduced fat.  (Ewwwwww!)  Normally I wouldn’t buy something reduced fat, but this wasn’t that bad.  The texture wasn’t as un-creamy as reduced-fat ice cream sometimes is.  Honestly, if I didn’t know it was reduced fat before I tried it I probably wouldn’t have guess.d I could tell it was pumpkin flavored, which is more than I can say for some pumpkin ice creams that lean too heavily on the ‘spice’ part of pumpkin-spice.  As far as the spi...

Several weekends ago Minneapolis got a taste of Indian summer.  It was a warm, delightful 80 degrees all weekend, perhaps the last weekend of the year where it is possible to walk to the ice cream shop and laze in the grass as you lick the desultory drips of ice cream that run slowly down your cone. To celebrate, I invited a bunch of math people to go to Izzy’s and we had a fairly good turn out, about 15 people. I saw that they had pumpkin, a seasonal flavor, so I immediately knew I had to get that.  Also, they had an intriguing people’s choice flavor award winner, Irish Moxie.  You can never go wrong with an Izzy’s people’s choice winner.  Normally at Izzy’s I get a single scoop, and was planning to get a single scoop of one of the aforementioned flavors with the other as an Izzy scoop, but I could not, for the life of me, decide which flavor I wanted more of.  The only solution was to get a double scoop with an Izzy scoop of cinnamon.  If there ...