Jeni's - Buttercream Birthday Cake

Buttercream Birthday Cake - Buttercream Frosting, Golden Cake, and a Rainbow of Sprinkles

 

Today we return to Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream of Columbus Ohio for a new flavor that I actually found locally.  I usually have to make an online purchase to get the latest Jeni's flavors because local grocery stores generally just carry the classics.  They have had several new releases this year already but they release them one-by-one instead of in batches, so I have not been able to order a separate shipment for each one of them.  So, I thought I had missed this Buttercream Birthday Cake release, but lo and behold, I spotted it at the Whole Foods on Lake & Excelsior in Minneapolis.  So I picked it up.  Birthday cake ice creams are big this year.  I have already seen new flavors from the Cheesecake Factory and Talenti to go with older flavors from Coolhaus, Graeter's and McConnell's as well as retired limited releases from Ample Hills and Ben & Jerry's.  Let's see how Jeni's compares.

First, the packaging is really nice.  I like all the sprinkles on the side as well as the candles on the lid.  Removing the lid and peeling back the foil, I see most of the ingredients right away.  The buttercream base has a very light color.  The sprinkles are small -- they appear to be sprinkle pieces.  Then I can see small crumb-sized pieces of the cake in there as well.  Digging in, it is a very appealing combination of flavors.  The buttercream, the small cake pieces and the sprinkles.  It is definitely not too sweet like some cake implementations are, but I wonder if it might not be sweet enough.  The buttercream is fully blended into the base instead of as a swirl of frosting and the cake pieces are so small that they blend in a bit themselves.  The combination was a little 'dryer' than I expected.

This is a fairly good implementation of a birthday-cake ice cream from Jeni's.  Don't get me wrong, the flavor is very good, but my expectations are higher with Jeni's.  I think I would have liked either a swirl of buttercream to moisten up the base a bit or larger cake pieces or both.  So, my favorite birthday cake implementation is still from McConnell's.