Jeni's - Gooey Butter Cake

Gooey Butter Cake - Cream cheese ice cream layered with crumbles of soft vanilla cake and swirls of made-from-scratch caramel-butterscotch sauce

Today is the day for the final pint from my six-pint Black Friday shipment from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams.  I like to mix up my brands so it took me a month to get through this shipment.  The flavor is called Gooey Butter Cake and is based on a cake popular in the Saint Louis area.  This is the second pint I've had which is based on this type of cake.  The previous pint was from Ample Hills.  It'll be interesting to compare and contrast the two pints.

I see a lot of interesting things as I remove the lid from the pint.  The cream cheese base in the background has the expected off-white color and there is quite a bit of caramel-colored splotches all across the top.  Digging in, I taste a strong vanilla flavor from the cake pieces right away.  It is quite tasty.  Then I taste the caramel sauce with notes of butterscotch.  That is also quite good.  As I eat my way down, I get a better view of the texture of the pint.  The cake pieces have been shredded and immersed in the caramel sauce.  Then that combination is marbled into the cream cheese base.  So, there are no large cake pieces -- nothing is 'chewy' -- yet these cake-and-sauce sections have a different texture which is much different than the ice cream.  It is not completely smooth, but any texture quickly melts in your mouth.  The vanilla flavor reminded me a bit of the recent Cream Puff pint in that they both deliver strong vanilla in unique ways.  There a vanilla custard with pastry flakes, here a vanilla cake in a cream cheese base (with a caramel sauce).

I really liked this pint of ice cream.  It is a very unique twist on a vanilla caramel swirl.  How does it compare to Ample Hills?  They are actually quite different.  Ample Hills uses very large cake chunks -- almost carton-spanning chunks, while Jeni's shreds the cake into a cakey-caramel swirl.  The presence of caramel is a big difference as well.  I really liked both.  Your preference would depend on how chunky of a mood you are in.  Enjoy.