The Big Muddy Ice Cream Blog

"April is the cruellest month ..." Spring in Minneapolis is a weird time. We're coming out of, let's be real, 6-7 months of winter. Everyone is absolutely sick and tired of the snow, the cold, the dark, the wet and there's a collective yet suppressed giddiness in the air. We're ecstatic that it's warm, and we wear shorts and tank tops and sit outside in the grass when it gets above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other hand, we know we're not really out of winter's woods until June, so we don't want to show our excitement in case of a May snowstorm; in which case we say, "Aw jeez, looks like snow again, good thing I didn't put away my boots and winter clothes." What does Haagen-Dazs Toasted Coconut Caramel Ice cream, described as sumptuous swirls of dulce de leche caramel and flaky hints of toasted coconut shine through each bite of this indulgent coconut ice cream, and Minnesota spring have to do with each other? Toasted Coc...

On my last trip to the grocery store in Midway I saw that ice cream was on sale so I picked up a couple pints including Tillamook Toasted Coconut Fudge Gelato. This gelato is Silky toasted coconut gelato and rich chocolate fudge, sprinkled with crunchy coconut flakes. Interestingly, Tillamook went with the technique of putting mix-ins on top of the gelato, something usually reserved for scoop shops where the shallow gelato pans make it easy to get a bit of topping in each serving.  Because a pint is deeper than it is wide, it would be kind of hard to get the toasted coconut topping in every bowlful unless you ate the whole pint at once, and the coconut topping was critical to the balance of the flavor. The coconut base was good, but didn't read as toasted coconut to me.  It had a slight hint of sunscreen coconut instead of the rich warm flavor of toasted coconut.  This was actually quite good in combination with the toasted coconut flakes, as the flavor of th...

On my second trip to Timpfreeze, I decided to try a dip cone.  They have vanilla and pineapple soft serve and tons of different dip options.  The ones I remember are chocolate, cherry, butterscotch, and toasted coconut.  There were definitely more options, and they have more listed on their website , but I don't think the website menu is 100% accurate. If someone offers me butterscotch I'm literally incapable of refusing, so I originally ordered a vanilla with butterscotch dip cone.  Unfortunately the butterscotch dip had come out slightly burnt, so I instead went with pineapple and toasted coconut. So summery! They put a little plastic figure in each soft serve cone. So cute! I got a mermaid but I also saw someone with a brontosaur. Individually, the toasted coconut shell and the pineapple soft serve were great, but it didn't turn out to be a great combo.  The toasted coconut shell was amazing and would get 🍦🍦🍦🍦/4 cones on its own.  I love ...

So while I was conducting research in California I ate a lot of delicious local ice cream and had a blast. However, when I'm potentially publishing my research I'm probably not disclosing my research site. So, I decided, to protect the people I worked with, not to write reviews of those ice cream shops in case some random creeper decided to hard core stalk me to try to figure out where I did research. And while it was very disappointing to eat all that delicious ice cream and not be able to review it, I did get so froyo at a California-wide chain, Yogurtland, so I can totally tell all of you all about it! I'm sure many of you may think my 8-step froyo shop review process is a bit excessive, but I'm just trying to keep you, Dearest Readers, as informed about frozen dessert issues as possible! Here are my 8 steps I go through when reviewing a froyo shop! 1) The variety of flavors: is there a good selection? 2) The flavor of my choices. 3) The quality of the com...