Sweet Science - Tipsy Cherry Pie

Tipsy Cherry Pie - Vanilla-Almond Ice Cream with Tipsy Cherry Pie Pieces

Today would have been the start of the Minnesota State Fair, but it was cancelled this year for the pandemic.  Recently, I ordered the State Fair Collection from Jeni's (first review was here) and that tied me over for a little while.  Now, Saint Paul's own Sweet Science Ice Cream has released their own State Fair flavors -- four new flavors which have a fair-food theme to it.  I stopped by their scoop shop at the  Keg & Case Market and picked up all four pints.  Today's flavor is called Tipsy Cherry Pie.  It features a vanilla-almond ice cream with cherry pie mix-ins from Sara's Tipsy Pies of Stillwater.  These are single-serving pies which are made "tipsy" with a dash of wine or other alcoholic beverage for flavoring.  Nothing that will actually get you tipsy (all have less than ~2% alcohol) but alcoholic drinks can have unique, interesting and aromatic flavors than can provide a great accent flavoring.  I have seen pre-packaged pies from Sara's available at Lund's & Byerly's and their website says that they can also be found at some Cub Foods locations.  The pie used in today's pint is one of their new flavors "Cheery Cherry Cream".  The "tipsy" part of the pie is made by  a white wine from the local 7 Vines Winery  This sounds like a fun and interesting flavor.

Also, I should note that this review is for my 700th pint!  As I have for previous "century reviews", I like to include collage of the previous 100 pint photos -- for previous collages, see the reviews for pints 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500, and 600.   Here is today's collage:

Pints 601 to 700

These reviews date back to February 9th, which means that the vast majority of them have occurred after the pandemic started.  I am so happy that I have been able to continue to find pints which I have not yet tried even during these interesting times.  Here is to hoping that continues into the future.

OK, on to the ice cream!  Removing the lid, the vanilla almond base has yellowish off-white color to it and there are a couple of chunks of the cherry pie mix-ins on the top.  Digging in, the cherry pie mix-ins are delicious.  The wine makes the cherry filling not as sweet as normal cherry pies.  It sort of like a cross between cherry pie and cherries Jubilee.  There is quite a bit of crust in each of the pie pieces as well.  I can taste the vanilla in the base ice cream, but I did not notice the almond.  It's a good base for the mix-ins.  Perhaps the vanilla base is not as bright as some vanillas are, which goes well with the complex flavor of the cherry-wine-crust mix-ins.

I enjoyed this cherry-pie ice cream from Sweet Science quite a bit.  The pie mix-ins from Sara's Tipsy Pies had an interesting and complex flavor to it.  It made me want to check out their pies the next time I see them.  On the other hand, I eat so much ice cream, I'm not sure when I'm going to get around to that, but if I had room for twice the dessert, I would check it out.  Ha ha.