Ben & Jerry's Cookie Core - Spectacular Speculoos

Spectacular Speculoos - Dark Caramel & Vanilla Ice Creams with Speculoos Cookies & a Speculoos Cookie Butter Core

In the first few weeks of 2015, Ben & Jerry's premiered its new "cookie core" flavors.  These are similar to the "core" flavors from a couple of years ago where there's a large central section of non-ice cream filler in the pint, but for the "cookie core" flavors, the central section is cookie butter.  Cookie butter is basically cooked cookies (not dough) which are ground up into their crumbs and then somehow liquified into a spreadable paste -- often with condensed milk, but I don't know how Ben & Jerry's does it.  Anyways, cookie butter has grown in popularity over the past few years and Ben & Jerry's has decided to jump on the bandwagon with these new flavors.

With the Spectacular Speculoos flavor, the cookie butter of choice is speculoo cookie butter.  "Speculoos" is a brand of cookie butter popularized by Trader Joe's but a speculoo is also a specific type of Dutch/Belgian holiday cookie.  The speculoo is a spicy cookie (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, etc) so it makes for a flavorful cookie butter.

Opening this particular pint of Spectacular Speculoos, I could see all the ingredients right away on the top.  The split base had caramel ice cream on one side and vanilla ice cream on the other.  I could see a couple of cookie pieces and there was even the start of the cookie butter core visible on the very top.

Digging into the pint, the spiciness of the speculoo cookies and cookie butter dominates the pint. Vanilla is a naturally complementary base, but in this case the caramel was quite subtle as well. I am not sure what 'dark caramel' means, but it doesn't mean stronger caramel flavor.  The subtle base flavors were not bad because speculoos are so flavorful.  The cookie pieces were often soft, also a couple of them were crunchy.  The cookie butter had a thick brown sugary paste consistency.  The cookie butter was good enough to eat by itself, but I tried to conserve it like I do with the other core flavors by "eating around" the core and working a little bit of the butter into each spoonful.

A very successful flavor.  It is my favorite of the three new cookie core flavors.  I already know several people reading this like it, but I wanted to have another pint so I worked it into a review.  :-)