Ben & Jerry's - Sweet Like Sugar

Sweet Like Sugar - Sweet Cream Ice Cream with a hint of Almond flavor & Shortbread Cookies & Cherry Ice Cream with Cherries & a Sugar Cookie Dough Core

Ben & Jerry's has new flavors for 2019!  Ben & Jerry's is the brand that got me started with these reviews.  I don't get to have their ice cream as often any more because I've reviewed all of the items on the current menu.  So, I'm relegated to waiting for new flavors to come out so that I can have Ben & Jerry's again.  For 2019, Ben & Jerry's is releasing three new "Core" flavors.  As has been mentioned in previous reviews, a "Core" flavor is where a there is a cylinder of a non-ice cream mix-in in the center of the carton with ice cream on the outside.   The first set of core flavors all contained thick and gooey mix-ins -- like caramel, fudge, jam, and later cheesecake and brownie batter.  Then in 2015 they came out with "cookie cores" where the core was made from cookie butter (baked cookies that are ground up and mixed with condensed milk to form a spreadable paste).  This year, they're releasing "cookie dough cores".  If cookie butter worked well, why not cookie dough?  The three cookie dough core flavors use three different types of cookie dough: sugar cookie dough, chocolate chip cookie dough and a 'no bake' cookie dough core.  I trekked down to my local scoop shop to pick them up.  They had one of them.  It is called Sweet Like Sugar and has a core of sugar cookie dough.  Surrounding the core is sweet cream, a hint of almond flavor, shortbread cookies, cherry ice cream and cherries.  That's a lot of flavors!  Let's see how this all works out.

Opening the pint, I actually see almost all the ingredients right away -- which is impressive because there are so many of them.  The two bases are split.  Sweet cream on one half, and cherry on the other.  The cherry base is a very light pink.  The top of the sugar cookie dough core can be seen.  Expectedly, it is the light yellow color of sugar cookies.  I can see one of the cherry pieces as well.  Digging in, the cherry base is light and subtle while the cherry pieces are larger than I expected and delicious.  The emphasis on the cherry side is on the cherry pieces.  It is quite good.  On the sweet cream side, I don't taste the hint of almond much -- perhaps too subtle for me.  I first confused the shortbread cookie mix-ins with the core.  They are different though.  The shortbread cookies are soft, but have certainly been baked.  The sugar cookie dough core is the most distinctive part of the pint.  It has an interesting texture.  It is softer and gooier than I expected -- some cookie doughs are thicker and have some grainy sugariness.  It is quite fun to eat.  There is not a very large amount of it compared to other core flavors though.  That was OK, because the surrounding ice creams were good.

This is a very interesting and flavorful pint of ice cream.  I don't know how Ben & Jerry's is able to mass-produce this blend of ingredients -- core in the middle with cherry base and cherries on one side and sweet cream and shortbread cookies on the other.  It all has the potential to go awry in the mix but each flavor remains distinct and delicious.  I did like the pint.  It's worth a try if you like cookie dough flavors.  There is more cherry flavor in this mix than I was expecting -- it isn't obvious when you see the pint in a freezer case that there will be this much cherry.  I really liked the cherry flavor, but people might be surprised.  I am anxious to try out the other two cookie dough core flavors.  I hope my local scoop shop stocks them soon.