McConnell's - Rockier Road

Rockier Road - Chocolate Ice Cream with Almond Pieces and a Marshmallow Swirl

It is back to my shipment from McConnell's Ice Cream in Santa Barbara.  The first two flavors (here and here) were summer seasonal flavors and I was lucky to get them shipped to me before they were discontinued.  We move on now to the fall-release flavors which are still available online (and not available to my knowledge in Minnesota grocery stores).  The first fall flavor is called Rockier Road.  It looks like a standard implementation of rocky road -- chocolate marshmallow and almonds.  Rocky Road is the classic old flavor that I have tried from Häagen-Dazs (see here for history of the flavor), Jeni's, Baskin Robbins and Lapperts.  It should be fun to see how McConnell's implentation compares.

Popping open the top and removing the extra seal, I see the rich brown color of chocolate ice cream.  No mix-ins are obvious to me right away.  As I dig in, the chocolate ice cream is thick and dense as most McConnell's bases are.  It has a very good chocolate flavor -- a little on the dark side, but not at all bitter.  I quickly encounter some of the nut mix-ins.  They are fairly small but certainly add crunchy texture.  What I do not see right away is marshmallow.  Digging down a little further, I finally find some. It looks about half-mixed into the base -- I wonder if that is what happened at the top of the pint.  It is pretty good, but it doesn't grab my attention the way the marshmallows in most Rocky Road implementations do.

This is a fairly standard implementation of Rocky Road from McConnell's.  It's a little light on the marshmallows, so if marshmallows are a big part of your Rocky Road expectations, I would stick with my favorite Rocky Road so far: Häagen-Dazs.  I know some people are not big on marshmallows, so maybe it would not bother those people, but without marshmallows you are left with only chocolate and almonds and McConnell's already had an amazing pint with that combination:  Chocolate Almond Brittle.  I don't see that flavor on their website anymore, they could consider bringing that one back.