Ben & Jerry's - Peanut Butter Half Baked

Peanut Butter Half Baked - Chocolate & Peanut Butter Ice Creams mixed with Gobs of Peanut Butter Cookie Dough & Fudge Brownies

Last fall, Ben & Jerry's released its latest limited-batch flavor "Peanut Butter Half Baked" to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of one of its most popular flavors "Half Baked".  Half Baked is a flavor which contains both chocolate chip cookie dough (unbaked) and fudge brownies (baked).  This is the peanut butter version so it contains peanut butter cookie dough and also the half vanilla base has been replaced by a half peanut butter ice cream base.  As I write this, I think it may have been a good idea to review "Half Baked" first, but this is a limited-batch flavor and I wanted to make sure I got it before it went away.

Opening the pint, mostly chocolate is visible thought there is a hint of swirl in the base.  Also visible right on top are the gobs of peanut butter cookie dough and the one of the fudge brownies.  Digging into the pint, the base flavors ended up being split down the middle with the peanut butter ice cream on one side of the pint and the chocolate ice cream on the other side.  As mentioned in other reviews the peanut butter ice cream has a nutty rather than a creamy flavor and texture.

The real star of this flavor this flavor are the cookie dough and brownie fill-ins.  I am not a big fan of fully-baked peanut butter cookies, but the dough for these cookies is quite good.  It is a great way of deliverying soft peanut buttery flavor -- such a good way that I don't think there needed to be peanut butter in the base but that may be a personal preference.  Peanut butter lovers may appreciate the double dose.  The fudge brownies are provided from the Greystone Bakery which is located in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.  The bakery is founded and run by a Zen Buddhist and all of their profits go to the charitable Greystone Foundation which seems to fit in with the hippie culture of Ben & Jerry's.  They have built a failure large business with Ben & Jerry's as their largest client and their brownies are quite tasty.  In this pint, both the cookie dough and the brownies stay soft and chewy despite being embedded inside a frozen treat.  With so many fill-ins this ice cream was thicker and slower-melting than most flavors.  I've written in the past about how caramel, marshmallow and fudge swirls can make the ice cream 'gooey', well here the dough and brownies have the opposite effect.

Peanut Butter Half Baked is another successful mix of chocolate and peanut butter.  There are so many ways in which these flavors can be mixed and its always interesting to see what they will come up with next.  If I had to quibble, I think in my particular pint, the cookie dough chunks outnumbered the brownies by a ratio of two to one and I would have preferred a more even split -- although that may be something that may vary from pint to pint.  Remember, this is a limited batch flavor so if this combination intrigues you then check it out before it goes away for good.  My feeling is that this batch served as a practice run for the Tonight Dough flavor which also used peanut butter cookie dough to great effect.