Three Twins - Lemon Cookie

Lemon Cookie - Lemon Ice Cream with Vanilla Sandwich Creme Cookies

Recently, my regular grocery store started carrying a new brand of premium pints called Three Twins, so I figured I would give it a shot.  Three Twins was founded by Neal Gottlieb in San Rafael, California about ten years ago.  There's a fun story behind the name.  At the time of the company's founding, Neal was living with his twin brother Carl and Carl's wife Liz.  Liz was herself also a twin so they named their apartment "three twins".  Neal decided that would also be a cool name for his new ice cream business as well.  For the first flavor of this new brand, I decided to try Lemon Cookie.  Lemon is one of my favorite flavors and it is so rarely found in ice cream.  The mix-in here is vanilla sandwich cookies.  I prefer this time of sandwich cookie over Oreos.

Taking off the lid shows the pale yellow color of the lemon base with hints of the cookie mix-ins below.  Eating my way into the pint, the lemon flavor was noticeable in the base but it was not too strong.  Like other citrus-based flavors, it was a bit on the icy side, not very creamy.  Still tasty though.  The cookie pieces were fairly numerous.  I mainly tasted the cookies and not the creme filling (if there was any).  It tasted pretty good, though.

A unique and successful pint.   Citrus bases are indeed tricky and they often do come out icy like this pint did.  I'm now curious about what using lemon curd mix-in within a vanilla base would be like -- similar to the previous tangerine flavor.  Still, lemon lovers will want to try this out because it is hard to find a lemon ice cream which is not a sherbet or a sorbet.

Häagen-Dazs - Vanilla, Tangerine & Shortbread

Vanilla, Tangerine & Shortbread - Vanilla Ice Cream with a Tangerine Swirl and Shortbread Cookie Pieces

It appears that Häagen-Dazs has retired their Artisan line of flavors and in their stead they have introduced what they are calling a "Destination Series".  With these flavors, Häagen-Dazs hopes to transport us somewhere.  One way this differs from the Artisan line is the packaging.  Here, Häagen-Dazs has chosen a design much more similar to their regular flavors with just a red "Destination Series" bar added above the flavor name.  I think this helps maintain the brand recognition for the customer scanning the grocery store freezer case.  Which destination are we being transported to today?  Well, it appears that the Vanilla, Tangerine & Shortbread flavor is supposed to be reminiscent of a tea time snack in the to the United Kingdom.  I knew about the Brit's love of shortbread, but I did not know about the tangerines.  I'll go with it.  For the tangerine swirl, they have employed the help of Rare Bird Preserves.  I'm in the mood for something fruity and tangerines in ice cream is a new one for me, so I'm looking forward to this pint.

Opening the pint shows the the vanilla base with some hints of yellow from the tangerine swirl.  Digging in, the first couple of spoonfuls tasted mostly like vanilla.  Bits of tangerine curd did get into my mouth though and they were flavorful.  The shortbread pieces show up down in the pint as well.  For me, shortbread is not something that provides much by itself.  These were just chewy sections of the pint.  Certainly nothing objectionable about these pieces though.  They just changed up the texture a bit now and then.  As I continued eating my way through the pint, I happily found that the flavor of the tangerine curd got more stronger.  I think it may have taken a while for it to build up on my taste buds.  After a while the tangerine and ice cream mix reminded me a bit of an orange Dreamsicle -- or maybe a Creamsicle, I don't remember the difference.

After a slow start in the first couple of spoonfuls, this turned out to be very successful pint.  Citrus & ice cream are tough to mix but it seems like Häagen-Dazs has figured it out here.  If you like tangerines or oranges in your ice cream, you should check this out.  I'm also looking forward to seeing what else is in store in Häagen-Dazs' Destination Series.

 

Coolhaus - Chocolate Molten Cake

Chocolate Molten Cake - Chocolate Ice Cream with Chewy Cake Pieces and a Fudge Swirl

Today we return to the Culver City-based Coolhaus brand for their Chocolate Molten Cake flavor.  A molten cake -- also called a lava cake -- is a cake which is either low-flour or no-flour which is not fully cooked so that it still has a pudding-like batter on the inside.  Sounds like a promising idea for an ice cream flavor.

Remembering from the first review of this brand that Coolhaus is the brand which is "architecturally inspired".  Which architect is associated with this flavor?  Why it is the Los Angeles-based architect, Michael Maltzan.  Maltzan is a living and active architect who in addition to doing the requisite of set of museums and theaters has focused a good portion of his work bringing bright and modern structures to previously-rundown neighborhoods.  An overview of his work is available at the website for his firm.  His current big project is replacing the iconic Sixth Street Viaduct which connects downtown Los Angeles to the Boyle Heights neighborhood while crossing the Los Angeles River and the 5, 10 and 101 freeways along the way.

On to the ice cream!  Removing the lid, there is a small amount of frost on the top but nothing to be alarmed about.  I see chocolate ice cream and some of the dark fudge swirls are even evident right away.  Digging into the pint, the chocolate base is quite good.  The chocolate cake pieces were soft, fairly numerous and tasty as well.  The fudge swirl seems intended to mimic the 'molten' or 'lava' nature of the cake.  This swirl was a bit too thin to create that type of textural effect but it did add a strong chocolate kick to an already chocolatey mix which was quite good.  Chocolate lovers would approve. 

A very successful pint which I would recommend to anyone that loves chocolate.  It's interesting to see how it compares and contrasts to similar flavors from other brands.  Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie has larger, chewier brownie pieces instead of the softer cake pieces but no extra kick in its base.  The Brownie Batter Core flavor has the genuine lava-like core of uncooked batter which some brownie pieces but it also has a split base of chocolate and vanilla.  Steve's  Brooklyn Blackout Cake is a very similar flavor which features dark chocolate while this pint features regular chocolate.  Fans of the above will want to check out this Chocolate Molten Cake flavor.

Steve's - Blackberry Crumble

Blackberry Crumble - Vanilla Ice Cream with Blackberry Jam and a Cinnamon-Oat Streusel

 Today, we return to Steve's for their Blackberry Crumble flavor.   This is another "pie flavor" where a fruit mix-in is blended together with some crust-like mix-in.  Some flavors use a graham cracker swirl, here we have a cinnamon oat streusel added into the mix.  I haven't had an ice cream with a blackberry mix-in yet, so I was looking forward to this flavor.

Removing the lid shows the vanilla base with splotches of purple from the blackberry jam.  Eating my way down into the pint, I notice that the pint is not very well mixed.  Much of the pint is simply vanilla ice cream while the blackberry and streusel appear to be hugging the sides of the container.  You can see this in the pictures that I took.  I had to eat over half a pint of vanilla ice cream before I could take a decent photo of the blackberry mix-in.  When there was blackberry in the spoon, it was quite flavorful and the streusel performed its crust-simulation admirably.

The ingredients of a good pint of ice cream were all there, but I cannot overlook the mixing problem that Steve's has here.  So much of this pint was just plain vanilla ice cream.  If you do love blackberry pie, you could take a gamble and hope that your pint is better blended, but I'll probably stick with one of the other fruit pie implementations out there.

Häagen-Dazs - Caramel Cone

Caramel Cone - Caramel Ice Cream with Chocolate Covered Cone Pieces and a Caramel Swirl

Today we try one from Häagen-Dazs' regular line up: Caramel Cone.  My sister requested this flavor.  She was telling me "Ben & Jerry's Americone Dream is pretty good, but Häagen-Dazs' Caramel Cone is actually better!"  Could it be?  My hero, the great Stephen Colbert is outdone by Häagen-Dazs?  The challenge is accepted. 

Showdown!

It had been been over a year since I reviewed Americone Dream, so I snuck in a pint a couple of days ago to refresh my memory.  Reading the labels, I see one significant difference.  Americone Dream uses a vanilla base while Caramel Cone uses a caramel base.  Otherwise, the both have chocolate-covered cone pieces and a caramel swirl so its still a good match for a head-to-head comparison.

Focusing now on Caramel Cone.  Removing the lid shows the distinctive beige color of the caramel base.  There's also quite a bit of chocolate pieces and caramel swirl visible on the very top as well.  Digging in, the cone pieces are quite numerous and provide quite a bit of chocolate flavor.  These cone pieces are a bit different than those in Americone Dream.  Americone Dream had crunchy sugar cone pieces covered in chocolate so they had a bit of a bright airy crunch to them.  Caramel Cone's pieces were more like those from a dark-colored waffle cone.  A bit softer but still good.  The caramel base here is good but the star of the pint is the caramel swirl.  It is quite flavorful and there is quite a bit of it.  Caramel Cone is indeed very caramel-ly!

I really enjoyed this pint.  I hate to say it, but I think my sister is right!  Caramel Cone does beat Americone Dream in the head-to-head showdown!  Individually, I did prefer Americone's crunchier sugar cone pieces, but Caramel Cone's pieces were still good and its pieces were quite a bit more numerous.  Most importantly, while Americone had a lot of vanilla ice cream and just a tease of caramel from time to time, Caramel Cone had so much caramel in both the base and the swirl and it was really good.  So, that's that.  If you like Americone Dream and wish it had more caramel, then you need to check out Caramel Cone.  Don't worry, Stephen.  You're still my favorite late night talk show host and I still watch you every night.

Baskin Robbins - Mom's Makin' Cookies

Mom's Makin' Cookies - Brown Sugar Flavored Ice Cream with Chocolate Chip Cookie Pieces, Chocolate Flavored Chips & Cookie Dough Batter Flavored Ribbon

Long before there was Ben & Jerry, there was Burt & Irv.  Irv Robbins learned the ice cream business while working in his father's ice cream shop in the Pacific Northwest as a kid.  After serving in WWII, he settled in Glendale, California and opened up his own shop.  Irv offered twenty different flavors which was a novelty at the time.  Most ice cream shops in the 1940s had just chocolate and vanilla (and maybe strawberry).  Burt Baskin was Irv's brother-in-law.  Burt was married to Irv's sister Shirley.  Irv's ice cream business was rapidly expanding and he convinced Burt to join him in the ice cream business.  They kept their stores separate for the first couple of years.  Burt's first store was actually on South Lake Ave in Pasadena not far from where I went to graduate school.  It's actually still there.  I walked past it all the time on the way to the grocery store and I had no idea that there was anything historic about the location.  Anyhow, it wasn't long before Burt & Irv had joined forces and a coin flip decided the order of the names.  They sold only ice cream and always offered a large number of flavors.  In the mid-50s, they started an ad campaign touting that they had a flavor for every day of the month or "31 flavors" and label stuck and is still with us today.  Baskin Robbins expanded rapidly thanks to the post-war franchise boom and eventually selling the brand to United Brands in the late 1960s.  Although its now been almost fifty years since Baskin-Robbins sold out to "big food", they have a key place in ice cream history in that they popularized the use of interesting and imaginative flavors.  I grabbed Mom's Makin' Cookies for the first flavor because was something I hadn't seen in other brands.  It appears to be a cross between cookies-n-cream and cookie-dough ice cream.  A true 'half-baked' implementation.  Ben & Jerry's Half Baked mixes cookie dough with brownies.

So what's it like to eat a pint of Baskin Robbins in the 21st century?  The first thing I notice is that the pint only has 14 ounces instead of 16.  That's a common packaging trick to make a product appear cheaper. Häagen-Dazs does the same thing.  Removing the lid, the brown sugar base is a lot lighter in color than I was expecting and some cookie pieces and chocolate chips are visible right away.  Eating into the pint, I did not notice the brown sugar flavor in the base.  I could tell it wasn't vanilla but I didn't notice any brown sugar.  I noted this in the Dirty Mint Chip review as well.  A hint of brown sugar flavoring can be too subtle for me I gues.  The chocolate pieces were the same mini chips can you can in the store.   They provided a good amount of chocolate flavor.  Something was odd about the cookies.  The side of the pint mentions cookie pieces and a separate cookie-dough ribbon.  I only saw one cookie mix-in. The mix-in was dryer and less chewy than a dough, but wasn't crunchy like a cookie.  It was like a cookie-flavored brown-sugary cake.  (I definitely noticed the brown sugar in there.)  As odd as it was, it tasted alright, though.

Although Baskin-Robbins has lost more than a bit of their original artisanal mojo over the past few decades, this was still a unique flavor that you don't see elsewhere.  I tried to describe the unique cookie flavored mix-in as well as I could above.  If that appeals to you, then this could be a fun flavor.  If not, then I would stick to either a standard cookie dough implementation or perhaps Milk & Cookies for a fully cooked cookie mix-in.  I'm looking forward to trying other Baskin Robbins flavors to see how they are.

Steve's - Mexican Chili Chocolate

Mexican Chili Chocolate - Chocolate Ice Cream laced with Cinnamon and Cayenne with Guajillo Chocolate Pieces

We're back to the Steve's brand with their Mexican Chili Chocolate flavor.  I must admit that I'm both intrigued and intimidated by this flavor.  I love Mexican food -- especially spicy Mexican food -- and I like chocolate, but I'm not sure if I' don't often think of the two of them going together.  I do like the idea of trying new flavors though and this is combination I've encountered in any of the previous reviews.

Opening the pint, I see the chocolate base with a slightly ligher brown color than expected.  Digging in, the cinnamon accent to the chocolate hit me right away but otherwise it was just really good chocolate.  Some of the other brands don't worry about the chocolate quality in their chocolate base and when they want extra chocolate flavor they add chocolate mix-ins.  Not here, though, as this is a very good chocolate base.   The chocolate pieces were pea-sized and occasionally dispersed through the pint adding extra dense chocolate flavor.  The cayenne and guajillo chili flavoring was not as potent as I expected.  In each spoonful, it did not distract from the excellent chocolate flavor that I described above but it was something that built up slowly as I was eating the pint.  It was a flavor that near the end of the pint stayed lingering on my teeth in between spoonfuls -- not a complaint, I rather enjoyed that sensation.  I have a couple of theories as to why it wasn't as spicy as I expected.  First, I tend to like my spicy food mucho caliente and perhaps a name brand chose not to be so bold in a pre-packaged pint.  Second, if you want to relieve your mouth of spice, you would have something cold and milky, so the ice cream base does act as a natural buffer for added spicy ingredients.

I did enjoy this pint, though.  It's a very tasty chocolate!  I've had a lot of different chocolate ice creams in the past year, so that's saying something.   I would recommend this flavor if you like chocolate but are interested in a slightly spicy twist on your usual favorite.