Jeni's - Coffee with Cream & Sugar

Coffee with Cream & Sugar - Intelligentsia Coffee Steeped in Cream

The fourth flavor from my recent six pint Black Friday shipment from Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream is called Coffee with Cream & Sugar.  This looks like just coffee ice cream -- ice cream is made with cream and sugar after all.  The description mentions that they steep the grounds in the cream before churning.  This flavor is relatively new.  I believe it was added a year or two ago.  It appears to have replaced an old flavor called Intelligentsia Black Cat Espresso.  Both use Intelligentsia brand coffee.  I can see a seal with a black cat on today's flavor (to the right of the word 'sugar' on the front) so both specifically use the Black Cat Espresso product.  I think it's possible that this Coffee with Cream & Sugar is a rebranding of the older flavor.  The older name might have been confusing to people who did not immediately recognize it for what it was -- coffee ice cream. 

Jeni Britton Bauer -- the "Jeni" of Jeni's -- has a youtube video for made with Epicurious that challenges her to tell the difference between expensive and budget ice creams.  The whole thing is very interesting, but if you are short on time, the coffee tasting is between 11:35 and 15:09.  In the video, she has some interesting comments about what she thinks makes a good coffee ice cream.

On to this pint!  The top has a sandy beige color and is consistent with other coffee flavor.  I see a few dark specks scattered throughout the base as well.  Digging in, the ice cream is very thick and dense.  Jeni's uses tapioca syrup as a thickening agent and it makes the ice cream so firm and creamy that I often wonder if it would ever melt.  I always eat it too fast to find out though.  The coffee flavor is quite good.  It is a pure coffee flavor without any burnt or roasted notes and no hint of bitterness in the mix as well.  It is strong enough flavor-wise, but it not incredibly strong caffeine-wise.  By that I mean I do not get a caffeine headache from eating the full pint.

This is a simple and flavorful coffee ice cream from Jeni's.  It is quite good.  It seems to follow all the things that she mentions in the video above.  It smells like a good bag of coffee.  It has all the coffee flavoring without feeling like it is burnt or bitter.  It is delicious.  It is hard for me to rank this against all the other premium coffee ice creams that I have tried, but this is definitely one of the good ones.