Steve's - Whoopie Pies & Sweet Cream

Whoopie Pies & Sweet Cream - Sweet Cream Ice Cream with Whoopie Pie Pieces and a Swirl of Buttercream

Periodically, I go to Walmart to see if they have cycled their exclusive Ben & Jerry flavor again and while I'm there I check what else is in their freezer case.  They carry different Steve's flavors at Walmart than they do at Vons and the Whoopie Pies & Sweet Cream always catches my eye.  I was usually just intrigued, I'd go home and do a google search on 'whoopie pie' and I'd try to imagine what the ice cream might be like.  Last week, I was looking for a flavor to break up the series of
Häagen-Dazs "Destination Series" and I saw this flavor again and I pulled the trigger.  Yes, I will admit that I just got it because of the goofy name.  We'll see if this fun experiment proves to be tasty.

A whoopie pie is a dessert treat consisting of two round pieces of cake (usually chocolate) with cream or frosting sandwiched between them.  Multiple states claim to be the birthplace.  The Amish of Pennsylvania Dutch country are said to have been making these treats for generations.  An Amish legend has it that when farmers and school children would find these treats in their packed lunches, they would shout "whoopie!".    Massachusetts and Maine also claim origin.  Bakeries menus and cookbooks date the use of whoopie pies in those states at least as far back as the 1920s.  Maine has made the whoopie pie its "state treat" and in 2011 they baked the worlds largest whoopie pie which weighed 1062 pounds.  Growing up in the Midwest, we didn't have whoopie pies.  From the description, the closest thing we had was a Hostess Suzy Q which was rectangular instead of round.

On to the ice cream!  Removing the lid I see the sweet cream base with a couple of chocolate pieces visible and a bit of the frosting swirl is visible on the very top.  Digging in the frosting is harder than I expected.  It was crunchy!  It was sugary and tasted like frosting, but it had the consistency of the hard candy-like frosting used for small shapes and features on the top of cakes rather than the softer frosting or cream used for general coverage.  The cake pieces were dispersed through the center of the pint.  They were small and nugget-sized, thick and almost brownie-like.  They tasted a bit like tootsie rolls -- a bit cakier but not much.  The sweet cream base was soft and creamy and provided a good backdrop for the mix-ins.

Overall, it was not quite what I was expecting.  The fact that the cake pieces were thicker and more brownie-like was OK, but to create the sensation of a whoopie pies the buttercream frosting needed to be soft and creamy and not hard and crunchy.  Steve's has such bold and imaginative flavor ideas but they sometimes stumble with the implementation.  Maybe I got a fluke batch?  Or the store allowed the ice cream to melt and refreeze?  Perhaps.  If you've had better luck with this flavor, let me know.