Grande Ole Creamery - Cookie Monster

Cookie Monster - Butter Pecan Ice Cream with Crushed Cookies and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

Today we visit another Twin Cities brand, the Grand Ole Creamery, and its Cookie Monster flavor.  The Grand Ole Creamery is located on historic Grand Avenue in Saint Paul not too far from where I grew up.  One of my sisters actually worked there when she was in college.  It was opened in 1984 by Gary and Dawn Huffman.  On a trip to the east coast in the early 80s, they saw how popular premium ice cream shops were, but there were none in Saint Paul so they decided to open up their own shop to fill the void.  It quickly became a success and has outlasted a few national ice cream chains that have tried opening on Grand Avenue thanks to loyal support from neighborhood customers.  Today, I am trying out their Cookie Monster flavor.  It has cookies and cookie dough for mix-ins so it promises to be interesting.


Removing the lid, the ice cream is blue!  I did not expect that!  I double checked the side of the carton and indeed blue dye #1 is listed as an ingredient.  I guess they intentionally want the ice cream to look like the famous muppet character.  That's not exactly what I'm used to with premium ice creams -- they usually want to tout the use of natural ingredients -- but it is rather fun.  The base ice cream is thick and creamy like one would expect from a premium ice cream.  The flavor of the base was very mild.  I could only tell that it wasn't vanilla.  There are two types of mix-ins present.  First is the cookies.  These are crushed chocolate cookies like the outer parts of an Oreo,  The pieces are small enough to be mistaken for chips but on closer feel I could tell they were cookie pieces.  The cookie dough chunks were more rare.  I was at least a third of the way through the pint before I encountered the first one and I think there were only four or five chunks of dough in the whole pint.

This was a interesting pint and the blue color was kind of cute.  It is a little low on the mix-ins.  If you like lots of mix-ins then you'll likely prefer Ben & Jerry's Tonight Dough flavor, but if you actually like fewer mix-ins or if you're on Grand Avenue and want a fun blue scoop then you could give Cookie Monster a try.