Milkjam Creamery - Cookie Monster

Cookie Monster - Cookie Butter Ice Cream & All the Cookies

The next pint from the Minneapolis-based Milkjam Creamery is called Cookie Monster.  This is a second pint of ice cream which I have had with this name.  The other pint I got from Grand Ole Creamery in Saint Paul.  The two implementations could not be more different -- other than the fact that they both contain cookies.  I guess it is a fairly obvious flavor name pun.  Here, the base is flavored with cookie butter and there are cookie mix-ins.  Cookie butter is made when you bake cookies, grind them into a powder and mix them with something like sweetened condensed mix so that they form a spreadable paste.  I have described cookie butter in more detail in a previous review.  For the cookie mix-ins, Milkjam does not have an ingredient list so I am unsure of the details of what types of cookies are used.  They website just says 'all the cookies'.  With a mixture of interest and curiosity, I am anxious to dig in.

Opening the pint, the base ice cream is a light creamy beige and many small cookie mix-ins are visible.  With the first spoonful, the ice cream is soft and creamy.  The cookie butter flavor is more subtle than I was expecting.  I am getting notes of speculoos flavor, but nothing too intense.  The size of the mix-ins ranges from crumb-size to half-inch chunk size.  There is quite a variability to the cookies.  Some of them seem chocolatey,  others seem like oatmeal raisin.  They did taste homemade, though some of the oatmeal cookies may have been a bit overdone for my liking.  Overall, I actually found the mixture of cookies to be quite odd.  I couldn't really focus on one particular type of cookie and it was weird having raising in the mix (or at least what I thought were raisins, I don't have an ingredient list so I can't check).

This is certainly a bold and interesting pint, but it was not a hit with me.  Like many of the kitchen-sink types of flavors sometimes too many different types of mix-ins is too distracting.  Since Milkjam is often bold and experimental, they can sometimes hit the ball out of the park with something amazing, but once in the while the experiment doesn't click with me.  Perhaps it was on odd batch?  "All the cookies" might be different types of cookies on a different day?  I don't know.  If you're at Milkjam and you are curious, you could give it a try, or you could play it safe and have their amazing Oreo-themed cookies and cream flavor, Ridin' Duuurty.