Ben & Jerrys - Wake & "No Bake"

Wake & "No Bake" - Vanilla Ice Cream with Peanut Butter Cookies, Peanut Butter Ice Cream with Fudge Chips & a No Bake Cookie Dough Core

I tracked down the second of the three new Cookie Dough Core flavors that Ben & Jerry's has released for 2019.  The first flavor is reviewed here.  This flavor is called Wake & "No Bake".  I found it at one of their scoop shops.  The core for this flavor is a 'no bake' cookie dough.  What are 'no bake' cookies?  There are a lot of recipes online which can vary quite a bit.  The common denominators are that most recipes do not contain eggs and many don't use wheat flour.  To compensate, they'll use often use peanut butter and/or oatmeal to act as thickeners.  I suppose since they are not designed to be baked, that 'no bake' cookie dough is indeed just 'no bake' cookies.  I checked the ingredient list, the pint itself and eggs and wheat flour are listed -- but there are baked cookies in the mix which would contain both, and there are often eggs in ice cream bases.  I don't see any oatmeal listed peanuts are listed.  This unique core as well as a large number of other ingredients should make this an interesting pint.

Opening the pint, you can see just about everything on top.  As with many of the other core flavors,  Ben & Jerry's has split the based in half on each side of the core.  One one side, there is vanilla ice cream with peanut butter cookie mix-ins, on the other side there is peanut butter ice cream with fudge chip mix-ins and the no bake cookie dough forms the cylindrical core in the middle.  It's quite an engineering feat to get each base, the mix-ins and the core to go into their correct places, but Ben & Jerry's has gotten pretty good at this.  The peanut butter base is quite light in color.  I had to look twice to distinguish it from the vanilla.  Digging in the vanilla-peanut butter-cookie side was pretty good.  The peanut butter cookies were a little small but understandably so as to not distract too much from the core.  I could still taste them.  I had a similar reaction to the peanut-butter-fudge chip side.  The peanut butter base was a bit muted and the fudge chips were tasty as usual but there also was not as many of them   That brings us to the core.  It is quite solid -- not all gooey like most other cores.  It's quite chocolatey with some peanut butter in the mix.  It is crumbly rather than chewy.  Because of its crumbliness, it wasn't something that you could scoop into like other cores.  I often each a core flavor by scooping along side it and bringing in a bit of the core into every spoonful.  Here I ended up with a large core chunk on my spoon every once in a while.

This is an interesting flavor.  All the pieces were there and they each tasted as good as I expected, but I found that the hard texture of the core prevented it from mixing as I scooped my spoon.  These type of 'no bake' cookies would work better as a standard mix-in than as a core.  Just my two cents.  No bake cookie mix-ins are not easy to find, though -- this is my first one -- so if you really like those types of cookies, this is worth a try.