Ben & Jerrys - Peanut Butter & Cookies (Walmart Exclusive)

Peanut Butter & Cookies - Sweet Cream Ice Cream with Chocolate Sandwich Cookies & a Crunchy Peanut Butter Swirl

After finishing all of the extant Ben & Jerry flavor reviews last fall, it is so exciting to get two new flavors in one week!  Today's review is for a new Walmart-exclusive flavor.   Walmart has retired the Strawberry Not So Shortcake flavor and replace it with Peanut Butter & Cookies.  The only reason I go to Walmart is for the exclusive Ben & Jerry's flavors and since Walmart cycles their exclusive flavors more than other vendors, I end up making the trek across town a few times a year.  Peanut Butter & Cookies appears to be the classic "cookies and cream" with a peanut butter twist. Interestingly, Ben & Jerry's does not have a straight "cookies and cream" flavor.  They have two which are relatively close - Milk & Cookies alters the formula by using chocolate chip cookies instead of sandwich cookies (generic Oreos) while Mint Chocolate Cookie uses sandwich cookies but with a mint base instead of vanilla or sweet cream.

Removing the lid reveals a pint which looks like "cookies and cream" as one would expect.  Already on top you can see some orange coloration from the additional peanut butter swirl.    As I ate my way into the pint, it tasted much closer to a straight cookies and cream implementation than either of the variants above.  If Ben & Jerry's wanted to do a simple implementation of cookies and cream, it would be quite successful.  Of course, this particular pint is not without its own twist.  The peanut butter swirl is not ubiquitous -- not every spoonful has some of it -- but its flavor is sticks out when it is encountered.  So even though there is not a lot of orange in the pictures, it does appear to be the right balance between the peanut butter and the cookies.  The fact that sweet cream is used instead of vanilla as a base is a bit curious.  For some reason, Ben & Jerry's usually avoids mixing peanut butter and vanilla.  I didn't miss the vanilla, though.  As the name of the flavor suggests, its all about the peanut butter and the cookies.

Adding peanut butter to cookies and cream is a very interesting idea.  I don't know if I would have thought to do that, but it turned out pretty well.  I just checked and found that there are actually two peanut butter variants of Oreos themselves (peanut butter filling and peanut butter creme filling).  I knew there were a lot of Oreo variants, but I hadn't thought of that combination either.  Anyhow, if you like cookies and cream and peanut butter then check this out before Walmart cycles its exclusive flavor again.