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| Take the Cannoli - Italian Mascarpone Ice Cream with Chocolate Covered Cannoli Shells |
Today is the third pint from my recent six-pint shipment from the Culver-City-based Coolhaus Ice Cream. This flavor is called Take the Cannoli. Locally, the Fresh Thyme Market carries this fun brand, but they stock only a half-dozen older flavors. With this online order, I focused on flavors I cannot find in Minnesota (yet?) OK, now that I have sufficiently warned local readers not to expect to find this flavor in local freezer cases, let's check it out.
Take the Cannoli is based on the Italian dessert which is a fried dough shell filled with a soft, sweet cheese and perhaps other sweet mix-ins. Traditionally, ricotta is used for the cheese but it is quite common to use mascarpone as a substitute because mascarpone is has a thicker consistency which is easier to work with. There is an interesting discussion of this substitution here. Here, Coolhaus uses mascarpone as the base and chocolate-covered cannoli shells as the mix-ins. I like the green and red color scheme of the carton which matches the Italian flag. OK, on to the ice cream!
Removing the lids and peeling back the cheeky foil wrapper, I see the bright white color of the mascarpone base and several of the chocolate-covered shells are nicely displayed right on top of the pint. Coolhaus has stepped up their top-of-the-pint presentation in the past couple of years and this is pint is a good example of that. Digging in, the mascarpone base is significantly sweeter than I expected. I tend to think of mascarpone as being a thick almost buttery dessert cheese which is sometimes added to mute the sweetness of a fruity mix-in but here the base itself is quite sweet. Definitely the sweetest mascarpone I have had yet. Perhaps this is done to mimic the sweetness of cannoli? I am not sure. The chocolatey mix-ins are generously dispersed throughout the pint. They provide quite a bit of chocolate flavor. I can see the doughy cannoli shells inside. I did not even have to break them open to see. A normal scoop of my spoon would often slice through the chocolate and expose the shell inside. The dough itself did not provide that much flavor -- I primarily tasted the chocolate. The chocolate tasted good though.
This is a fun flavor from Coolhaus. It is essentially a mascarpone and chocolate mix and both of those flavors are easy on most people's palates. It is a bit sweeter than I expected, but still good enough to recommend to all the cannoli lovers out there. Surprisingly, I haven't had a cannoli-based flavor yet. I see there's an old flavor in Ben & Jerry's Graveyard, but I missed it by a couple of decades. I will keep my eye out for other cannoli implementations.
Take the Cannoli is based on the Italian dessert which is a fried dough shell filled with a soft, sweet cheese and perhaps other sweet mix-ins. Traditionally, ricotta is used for the cheese but it is quite common to use mascarpone as a substitute because mascarpone is has a thicker consistency which is easier to work with. There is an interesting discussion of this substitution here. Here, Coolhaus uses mascarpone as the base and chocolate-covered cannoli shells as the mix-ins. I like the green and red color scheme of the carton which matches the Italian flag. OK, on to the ice cream!
Removing the lids and peeling back the cheeky foil wrapper, I see the bright white color of the mascarpone base and several of the chocolate-covered shells are nicely displayed right on top of the pint. Coolhaus has stepped up their top-of-the-pint presentation in the past couple of years and this is pint is a good example of that. Digging in, the mascarpone base is significantly sweeter than I expected. I tend to think of mascarpone as being a thick almost buttery dessert cheese which is sometimes added to mute the sweetness of a fruity mix-in but here the base itself is quite sweet. Definitely the sweetest mascarpone I have had yet. Perhaps this is done to mimic the sweetness of cannoli? I am not sure. The chocolatey mix-ins are generously dispersed throughout the pint. They provide quite a bit of chocolate flavor. I can see the doughy cannoli shells inside. I did not even have to break them open to see. A normal scoop of my spoon would often slice through the chocolate and expose the shell inside. The dough itself did not provide that much flavor -- I primarily tasted the chocolate. The chocolate tasted good though.
This is a fun flavor from Coolhaus. It is essentially a mascarpone and chocolate mix and both of those flavors are easy on most people's palates. It is a bit sweeter than I expected, but still good enough to recommend to all the cannoli lovers out there. Surprisingly, I haven't had a cannoli-based flavor yet. I see there's an old flavor in Ben & Jerry's Graveyard, but I missed it by a couple of decades. I will keep my eye out for other cannoli implementations.
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