Desserts- Ben & Jerry's Late Night Snack

Let me begin with one rather unprofessional thing that will sum up my feelings about this ice cream:
NOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOM.

Ok, now that that's out of my system, I will proceed with my review in actual English. 

When I first read the contents of this glorious little pint {Vanilla Bean Ice Cream with a Salty Caramel Swirl & Fudge Covered Potato Chip Clusters}

 I definitely felt a smidgen of doubt, but that was quickly smothered by my contention that if Ben & Jerrys puts things together, they are safe to go together.  The carton boasts that the flavor was inspired by Jimmy Fallon, which gave it absolutely no extra appeal as I find him to be annoying and generally un-funny.  But anyway... I really put my trust in the good old B&J on this one, and I was not disappointed.  I tend to go by the rule that the strangest sounding combinations of flavors are often the best (although outside the world of sweets I practice this rule much more conservatively) and this ice cream is a shining example of why I employ such ideology. 

The vanilla bean ice cream itself was fabulously smooth and creamy, and the salty caramel was indeed salty.  Not too salty, however, to get in the way of the more obvious source of salt: the potato chip.  The chip clusters are coated in semi-sweet chocolate and when the salt first hit my tongue they carried an almost chocolate-covered-pretzel type of flavor.  But as the cool vanilla and caramel mixture liquified in my mouth and began to drain down my throat, the flavor of the potato chips really starts to kick in.  Just as I was about to swallow it all I was blasted briefly with this perfect potato chip essence on my pallete that sang sweet harmony with the last bit of creamy vanilla on my tongue...perfection.  Very similar to Ben & Jerry's other late-night-inspired flavor Americone Dream, but the saltiness from the chips and the slightly salted caramel give it a more unique flavor that you won't find on the Haagen Daazs side of the freezer.

5 stars...there was literally not one thing I disliked about this ice cream, and I will definitely be buying it again.

Desserts- Breyers Blasts!- Chips Ahoy

  So Breyer's has launched this new line of ice cream flavors called Blasts!. (exclamation mark included to assert its excitingness)  we've seen several of these super-chunk types of ice creams before, so despite the exclamation point I wasn't expecting to find anything too crazy.  The amount of flavors was a bit dizzying, I'll give them that much at least.  Each features a different candy or cookie, and although I was intrigues by the Whoppers, Mrs. Fields, waffle cone and Heath bar flavors, I decided to go with the Chips Ahoy.  The reason for this was actually that I found it to be the most precarious-sounding ice cream situation.  The carton indicated that it contained whole mini-Chips Ahoy cookies as opposed to your usual globs of cookie dough, and I was concerned about what the texture of the cookies would be.  If they were wet and mooshy the whole thing would be a dud, but if they were still crunchy and flavorful (which I felt was pretty unlikely) there was no way it could fail. 
     I'm happy to say these were on sale 2 for 1 when I discovered them, because even at their regular price of $5.99 I would have bought it for the sake of testing.  Unfortunately when I went back for a second flavor to test the sale was already over.  But I digress...
     The first thing I did when I began my test was taste the actual ice cream itself.  The carton refers to it as a "Cookie-Flavored Dairy Dessert", dairy dessert being a term used for ice cream varieties made primarily from milk instead of cream.   I've had some "dairy desserts" which could definitely have been mistaken for ice cream, and sometimes the difference is negligible.  But I'm sorry to say Breyer's let me down a little on this one.  While it did live up to its claim of being cookie-flavored, I found it to be kind of flat...sort of like it was missing a certain dimension of sweetness.  I guess the best way to describe it would be that the ice cream itself had a sort of diet-type of taste to it...or lack of taste, I should say. I guess it's better that this ice cream is primarily milk since it is filled with "chocolatey chunks", a sugary fudge swirl and calorie-laden cookies, but I think the addition of real cream would have made all the difference in the flavor.
     Moving past the slightly disappointing cookie-flavored ice cream, I'm happy to say that the cookies themselves were surprisingly firm and even a little crunchy!  I was having trouble imagining entire cookies surviving in such an atmosphere, but Breyer's pulled it off very nicely leaving the cookies with a dipped-in-milk sort of texture... nothing like the dreaded completely-saturated-with-milk situation I'd imagined as my worst-case scenario. 
   What I liked most about this ice cream is that the chocolate chips, oh wait I'm sorry, the chocolatey chunks, taste just like the actuall Chips Ahoy chocolate chips.  Between that and the fudge swirl there was a lot of chocolate going on in this ice cream, but somehow it still came nowhere near to being too much.  In fact, I could have stood even a few more chocolate chunks and fudge swirl to balance out the slightly funky ice cream.  The proportion of cookies was just right...you don't get one in every single bite, but thankfully there was not a single bite in which plain ice cream existed without anything else in it. 
    I'm not positive I would buy this again, although if it were half price again I would certainly consider it.  Definitely worth the money at half price, and a fun flavor when you want something a little out of the ordinary.  Four stars, would be five but the flavor of the ice cream really threw me off at the beginning.