Milk Bar - Birthday Cake

Birthday Cake - Birthday Cake Flavored Ice Cream with Birthday Crumbs and Birthday Frosting

 

A reader named Reid in a recent review has directed me to a new brand available at Whole Foods called Milk Bar.  I went down to the Whole Foods on Selby in Saint Paul and picked up a couple of pints.  From what I could see in the freezer case, this brand appears to be selling well.  I hope they restock soon.  

Milk Bar was founded by Christina Tosi (homepage, wiki) and started off as a pastry shop on in New York City's East Village as the dessert pastry shop accompanying the nearby Momofuku restaurant in 2008.  It's been quite successful as a pastry shop, has been featured on all sorts of food-oriented television shows and now have over a dozen locations in six cities.  This spring, they've agreed to release a handful of pre-packaged ice cream flavors for Whole Foods (see articles here and here). 

It looks Milk Bar's signature flavor is "Cereal Milk".  I guess I should have started with that one, but I didn't do my write-up research before picked the flavor.  I chose Birthday Cake.  As has been mentioned in several recent review, birthday-cake-themed flavors are really big in the past couple of years. I have recently had flavors from Grand Ole Creamery, Jeni's, 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.  Lot's of flavors!  Each time I right a review, the list gets longer.  Let's add Milk Bar to the list.

Opening the lid, the protective seal has a small hand written note:  "XO. TOSI".  It threw me off for a bit because I did not initially know who "Tosi" was.  Plus, the writing looks so informal.  It looks like some random person with a ballpoint pen just removed lids and wrote secret notes to customers on the seal.  But now that I've read the article linked above, I know that Christina Tosi is the founder of the Milk Bar pastry shops and this message is from her to her customers.  Fun.  Removing the foil, the birthday cake ice cream has a yellowish color.  So not a white cake.  Some egg yolks are in the mix. Some sprinkles are visible on top as well as a bit of frosting.  Digging in, the cake flavored base is quite good.  It is sweet, but not overly so.  The cake pieces below are soft and chewy.  There is occasionally a little flakes of pastry frosting in the mix.  These are like the bits of frosting that fall off a frosted donut or pastry. They hold their consistency on their spoon, but they melt in your mouth when you eat it.

I liked this birthday-cake-themed flavor from Milk Bar very much.  It feels like I am eating birthday cake, but it is still ice cream and it is not too sweet.  I am still going to say that McConnell's Sprinkle Cake is still the gold standard, but that flavor is hard to find outside the west coast.  This is one of the better options here in the Twin Cities.  I liked it better than Cheesecake Factory and Grand Ole Creamery (although those were still good).  I am looking forward to trying out Milk Bar's Cereal Milk flavor soon.