McConnell's - Reindeer Tracks

Reindeer Tracks - Dark(ish) Chocolate Ice Cream, Spiked with Peppermint Candy and Heaps of cream-filled, Chewy Chocolate Cookies

Today I continuing my NYC trip eating ice creams I cannot find back in Minnesota.  Today's flavor is interestingly from the Santa Barbara-based McConnell's Ice Cream.  I was walking around the upper east side when I found a full stock of McConnell's pints at the Westside Market on Lexington.  Yes, the Westside Market has a location on the East Side where you can buy West Coast ice cream on the East Coast.  Oh the irony!  Anyhow, I was happy to find a couple of pints there.  The first pint is one of their holiday flavors called Reindeer Tracks.  It is a chocolate mint flavor with cookie pieces.

Removing the lid and peeling back the extra foil, the chocolate ice cream base is quite dark.  Digging in, like most McConnell's pints, it is thick and dense with not a lot of air churned in.  It is quite chocolatey and I also taste the peppermint blended in right a way.  The cookie pieces a distributed sporadically throughout the pint.  Since 'tracks' is in the flavor name, I expected to see more of them.  They are not bad and they do provide the occasional crunch but this is not as crunchy as a typical cookies & cream pint would be.

This is a decent chocolate and peppermint ice cream for the holiday season.  They flavors were a bit more muted than I was expecting.  The chocolate and peppermint were both quite good but neither flavor was as intense as I would expect from a premium brand.  McConnell's regular Mint Chip and Peppermint Stick are both among the best flavors of their kind that you can find, so I would stick with those if you are feeling like having a minty flavor during the holidays.