Baskin Robbins - Mom's Makin' Cookies

Mom's Makin' Cookies - Brown Sugar Flavored Ice Cream with Chocolate Chip Cookie Pieces, Chocolate Flavored Chips & Cookie Dough Batter Flavored Ribbon

Long before there was Ben & Jerry, there was Burt & Irv.  Irv Robbins learned the ice cream business while working in his father's ice cream shop in the Pacific Northwest as a kid.  After serving in WWII, he settled in Glendale, California and opened up his own shop.  Irv offered twenty different flavors which was a novelty at the time.  Most ice cream shops in the 1940s had just chocolate and vanilla (and maybe strawberry).  Burt Baskin was Irv's brother-in-law.  Burt was married to Irv's sister Shirley.  Irv's ice cream business was rapidly expanding and he convinced Burt to join him in the ice cream business.  They kept their stores separate for the first couple of years.  Burt's first store was actually on South Lake Ave in Pasadena not far from where I went to graduate school.  It's actually still there.  I walked past it all the time on the way to the grocery store and I had no idea that there was anything historic about the location.  Anyhow, it wasn't long before Burt & Irv had joined forces and a coin flip decided the order of the names.  They sold only ice cream and always offered a large number of flavors.  In the mid-50s, they started an ad campaign touting that they had a flavor for every day of the month or "31 flavors" and label stuck and is still with us today.  Baskin Robbins expanded rapidly thanks to the post-war franchise boom and eventually selling the brand to United Brands in the late 1960s.  Although its now been almost fifty years since Baskin-Robbins sold out to "big food", they have a key place in ice cream history in that they popularized the use of interesting and imaginative flavors.  I grabbed Mom's Makin' Cookies for the first flavor because was something I hadn't seen in other brands.  It appears to be a cross between cookies-n-cream and cookie-dough ice cream.  A true 'half-baked' implementation.  Ben & Jerry's Half Baked mixes cookie dough with brownies.

So what's it like to eat a pint of Baskin Robbins in the 21st century?  The first thing I notice is that the pint only has 14 ounces instead of 16.  That's a common packaging trick to make a product appear cheaper. Häagen-Dazs does the same thing.  Removing the lid, the brown sugar base is a lot lighter in color than I was expecting and some cookie pieces and chocolate chips are visible right away.  Eating into the pint, I did not notice the brown sugar flavor in the base.  I could tell it wasn't vanilla but I didn't notice any brown sugar.  I noted this in the Dirty Mint Chip review as well.  A hint of brown sugar flavoring can be too subtle for me I gues.  The chocolate pieces were the same mini chips can you can in the store.   They provided a good amount of chocolate flavor.  Something was odd about the cookies.  The side of the pint mentions cookie pieces and a separate cookie-dough ribbon.  I only saw one cookie mix-in. The mix-in was dryer and less chewy than a dough, but wasn't crunchy like a cookie.  It was like a cookie-flavored brown-sugary cake.  (I definitely noticed the brown sugar in there.)  As odd as it was, it tasted alright, though.

Although Baskin-Robbins has lost more than a bit of their original artisanal mojo over the past few decades, this was still a unique flavor that you don't see elsewhere.  I tried to describe the unique cookie flavored mix-in as well as I could above.  If that appeals to you, then this could be a fun flavor.  If not, then I would stick to either a standard cookie dough implementation or perhaps Milk & Cookies for a fully cooked cookie mix-in.  I'm looking forward to trying other Baskin Robbins flavors to see how they are.