Honeymoon - Chocolate Laurel

Chocolate Laurel - Sweet Cream infused with Bay Laurel Leaves with Chocolate Sablee Cookie Pieces

Shopping around for new pints, I appear to exhausted all of the 'new' flavors released by Ben & Jerry's and Häagen-Dazs this year -- at least all the ones that I can find.  I was in the mood for something new, so I went to Whole Foods to see what the super-premium brands were offering.  The honeymoon brand caught my eye.  That's the Bay Area brand that comes in small glass mason jars.  I decided to go with their Chocolate Laurel flavor.  Bay leaves in ice cream?  And the mix-ins are crushed chocolate sable cookies?  Part of me thinks that just knowing that this ice cream exists will help my hipster cred.  I suppose I did find it at Whole Foods.

I was curious about sable cookies because I was unfamiliar with the term.  It turns out that I do know this cookies just under a different name.  I know them as sand cookies -- 'sable' is the French word for sand - and they are so named because they crumble like sand when you eat them.  The ones I've had before are flavored with almond extract.  Here they are flavored with chocolate.

Unscrewing the mason jar shows a white ice cream base with a lot of chocolate cookie crumbs present even on the very top.  With the first spoonful, I immediately taste the bay leaves.  It is quite good actually.  I was not expecting laurel to be a flavor that would go well in a dessert.  I guess mint comes from a leave, too, but something seems different about that.  The crushed sable cookies added a lot of crunchy chocolate flavor into the mix.  They reminded me a bit of what a thin mint girl scout cookie would taste like without the mint.  Sure enough, after some googling I found recipes for homemade thin mints which described them as 'mint chocolate sables'.  So maybe that is the connection.  If mint can go with chocolate, why not bay leaves, too?  

This was a surprisingly successful pint for me.  There was plenty of bay laurel flavor in this pint and it actually went well with the chocolate and the ice cream.  I wonder why this combination is not done more often.  Anyhow, if you have access to the Honeymoon brand and are looking for a new flavor combination then certainly give this one a try.  It was fun.