Serendipity - Frrrozen Hot Chocolate

Frrrozen Hot Chocolate - Hot Chocolate Flavored Ice Cream with a Whipped Cream Swirl and Chocolate Shavings

I am still in New York City exploring the ice creams of the area during my holiday visit.  One new thing I noticed on this trip was that the famous Serendipity 3 restaurant on 60th St on the East Side now has a line of ice cream flavors available at many grocery stores.  This restaurant has been famous for decades but is known most outside NYC by its appearance in the John Cusack/Kate Beckinsale Romantic comedy which was itself named after the restaurant.  The most famous dessert on the restaurant menu is called Frrrozen Hot Chocolate (lots of pictures online) so a pre-packaged pint based on their signature dessert seemed like the obvious one for me to try.  It's got chocolate, whipped cream and chocolate shavings.  Let's check it out!

Removing the lid, I see the expected brown color of the chocolate base with many of the chocolate shavings visible right away as well as a couple of the swirls of whipped cream.  Digging in, the chocolate base does taste like hot chocolate.  A lot of good chocolate bases have this flavor palate (for example, Häagen-Dazs).  The chocolate shavings are softer than I imagined they would be.  Rather than being crunchy, they had the same texture of the curled shavings that are put on top of a french silk pie.  They are a little more chocolatey than the chocolate base.  The whipped cream swirl intrigued me.  I thought frozen whipped cream was ice cream (sweet cream), but this is lighter and gooey-er than ice cream itself.  The gooey texture reminded me a bit of a marshmallow swirl yet it did taste like whipped cream.  I checked the ingredients to see how they got the texture to come out right and it does look like they used a mixture of Cool Whip-like ingredients (corn syrup, cornstarch, various gums) to keep it gooey when frozen.  Perhaps a little disappointing for purists, but I did not mind.  It felt and tasted like whipped cream when I ate it.

This is a fun pint.  I was not expecting to have Frrrozen Hot Chocolate in a pre-packaged pint when I was visiting New York.  This brand is not a super-premium line of flavors -- it is more of a mid-range  in quality and price. It is certainly not a substitute for a visit to the restaurant, but I did enjoy for what it was.  A fun chocolate & whipped cream flavor.