Friday Feature: Food I'd Like to Eat, Ice Cream Edition

I thought it might be fun to introduce a new feature for Fridays, just because I have so much to say about food I can't limit myself to talking about just the stuff I can physically eat.  There is lots of junk out there that I'd love to get my chops around, but it just ain't gonna happen.

For example, this ice cream:

 (image clipped from Baskin Robbins Japan site)

Tea and scone flavored, only available in Japan--of course. Now, if I may make one careful observation, here in the UK the ice cream market seems incredibly risk averse. How long did it take for lowly cookies & cream to be a mainstream flavor? The Ben & Jerry's that is available here is just the most basic of their lineup in the USA, like less than what you'd find in a gas station, and every other brand sticks to such traditional flavors. Well, I'm going to make a stand right here, right now...Tea and scones are a traditional English flavor, and I demand they be translated into ice cream for these territories. Nowish!
Now my homeland the US of A is no slouch when it comes to the cold dairy, either. I like to keep up on the newest releases by reading On Second Scoop--it goes to show you how much more ice cream there is in the US than there is in the UK that the blog is based around ice cream, and shows no sign of slowing down after many years.

I've missed out on a some great flavors since living in the UK, stuff like B&J's Late Night Snack and Red Velvet Cake, and Dairy Queen's Golden Oreo something-or-other and Birthday Cake.  This is the current promoted flavor that I'm pining for...

(image lifted from Ben & Jerry's USA site)

"Mascarpone Ice Cream with Fudge Covered Cannoli Pastry Shell Chunks & Mascarpone Swirl"
I'm frowning so hard right now, it'll probably be long gone by the time I visit again. 

I've also missed Peppermint ice cream for the last three Christmases...in addition to missing my family of course...yes.

Now, all this being said, you can find some pretty interesting ice cream in the UK, it just won't be on grocery store shelves. Like any big city, London has some pretty cool ice cream spots. I've been lucky enough to visit Camden's nitro ice cream hit machine* Chin Chin Labs when they had a white chocolate sorbet, and that was incredible. They also do extremely weird flavors regularly, but they tend to trend more on weirdness than the pure indulgence of 'weird' American and Japanese flavors. For instance, the two flavors this week are something to do with scotch and something sour with rhubarb. I'd love to try either, but it's the kind of flavor you try once...an experience more than a tasty treat. However, that white chocolate sorbet I had was pretty awesome and I'd gladly get a pint of that if it were for sale.

Another place I've gone to a lot since moving to the UK is Scoop, a small gelato chain dotted throughout Central London. Even though the flavors are pretty simple, the quality is just tops. I really like the dark chocolate sorbet, it's basically black and incredibly dense with chocolate.

There is also the place that did breast milk ice cream, Icecreamists, but I've never eaten there and to be honest they seem really gimmicky and...stupid. I could be wrong, but I just don't gel the bad boy ice cream schtick. No matter how many skulls and rockabilly haircuts you attach to it, it is still a refreshing summertime treat adored by young and old. For all I know they have awesome product, but the approach is all wrong for me so I'm not tempted...also, their website doesn't seem to list any flavors, just lots of quotes.

Well, that's the first edition of Foods I'd Like to Eat. As you can tell the weather has just started warming up a skosh and already I'm thinking about ice cream.


*note: good name for a monster truck

Guest Post: Yubari Melon Steamcake

This is a li'l guest review by my life-guest, my husband. For background, he works for a Japanese-owned company and they get quite a few interesting snacks in their office, so he makes me super jealous when he eats things like this...

Yubari Melon Steamcake, as told by Mr. Steamy Cakes...

A small individually wrapped bite-sized cake from Japan. Poppable but did not pop...

Tastes a lot like cantaloupe melon, very soft bright orange sponge with hint of a liquid/curd filling also distinct cantaloupe melon. Probably most of the flavor is coming from the centre, actually.
 
Sponge not dissimilar to a Twinkie, maybe slightly lighter and softer, kind of hangs around at the back of your throat after eating. Probably best washed down with some melon soda! Very tasty if you like sweet &
melon.There you have it, folks! Now you'll know what a Yubari Melon Steamcake tastes like the next time your offered one by a high-profile Japanese investor, or something. Wish I coulda had one...

Mr Kipling's Mississippi Mud Pie

I used to swear up and down I didn't like Mississippi Mud Pie...I think it was just a regional thing. I didn't like Mississippi, I'd be damned if I liked their stupid 'mud' pie. Psh, who would ever eat mud willingly, anyway? Mississippians...

I'm all grown up now, and I don't hate Mississippi, and I even find myself quite enjoying their mud pie. Well, at least as it is interpreted by English people...never had an American-made one, actually. I've tried the Melt Mississippi Mud Pie bar, which was amazing...but unfortunately I don't live or work anywhere near a Melt so...

Smart move, Kipling, smart move. Although, these are unlike other Mississippi Mud Pies that I've seen, sometimes they just look like plates of chocolate colored goop and sometimes they are inexplicably cake. Then again, sometimes they look quite a bit like this:

Which is chocolatey goop enclosed in a pastry shell. Oh, but this is some tasty chocolate goop. They say it is a mousse, but I don't get any whippy, moussey texture when eaten heated or cold. It is more dense than a mousse, but less dense than a ganache. Right in the middle of those two textures, really! The topmost layer is chocolate icing, but there is a real strong brown sugar taste to it--not complaining, it tastes amazing with the fudgey under layer.

It tastes quite chocolate-y, don't get me wrong, but there are also nice tones of brown sugar and graham cracker throughout. The pastry shell tastes a bit like graham crackers or digestive biscuits, with surprised me as it looks like more of a shortcrust pastry. I'm glad they went with this style though, as it is much nicer with the chocolate innards than a more savory crust would be. After all, this is a sweet, sweet pie. Too delicious, but quite small for something that packs 200+ calories a pop. That's what you get when you eat a tasty brown sugary chocolate pie, I suppose!

One of the top things that the UK completely obliterates America with is the availability of tasty cakes and pies on grocery store shelves. Mr Kipling could punch Little Debbie and Hostess straight onto the moon. You couldn't make me eat a Twinkie, but you couldn't stop me from eating an Angel slice.

By the way, I would highly recommended taking the time to heat these up, as the warming really seems to bring out the flavors and makes the texture more similar to actual mud. That is what we're eating them for, right?

Cadbury Egg 'n' Spoon Milky Mousse

I was so excited to try this new Cadbury Easter treat, because I was crazy for these when I was a kid. Milka's presence in the USA seems to have a lot of weird turns, for instance I could very easily find those eggs for a couple years in Target, Kroger, just your average grocery store...but then, I couldn't find them at all outside of more 'world import' shops. It just seemed a toe was dipped into the USA, and then withdrawn. This devastated chunky 11 year old me, who just wanted to eat as many 'creme' based things as possible. Is that so wrong? Is that so wrong? Why did you forsake me, Milka? Where were you when I needed you, Kinder? From what I can tell they're much easier to find now, but for how long...how long until another chubby little girl is forced to go back to marshmallow eggs and live in memory?

If you check out the Candyblog review you can see that the Milka Li'l Scoops are packaged exactly like the Cadbury Egg 'n' Spoons, right down to the foil. It makes sense on both sides, as Milka and Cadbury both have majorly purple branding and are owned by Kraft.

I love the old fashioned purple carton, it is texturized and completely reminiscent of an egg carton--four eggs would not look out of place in here. The little spoons might not make much sense in this situation, but hey.

When you unwrap, it smells of milky chocolate like all Dairy Milk products smell...although I'm pretty sure this isn't officially Dairy Milk. I don't have the same brand loyalty or lifetime-of-eating that most natives have to Dairy Milk, so I couldn't really say whether it is all that different than the classic bars. It tastes super milky and sweet...

Sometimes I think about how strange the difference is between American and British chocolate. Like comparing Hershey's to Dairy Milk...why are they so different? I don't mean what ingredients they use to make them taste different, I'm sure its different ratios of sugar and milk--but why do we have two such different baseline 'chocolate' tastes? From what I hear, a lot of people in the UK don't much care for Hershey's, but I can tell you that most Americans I've known view Dairy Milk as a wonderful treat. My mom goes nuts for Mini Eggs and Creme Eggs every year they come out, and my dad's favorite candy bar of all time is Dairy Milk Whole Nut. Maybe Dairy Milk is just better, it has nothing to do with cultural tastes or anything, Hershey's is just easier for us to get a hold of so we accept it, haha.


Anyway, back to the treat at hand:

Nice. The cream is very tasty, I went with the vanilla/milky flavor and was pleased with the dairy taste. It actually isn't all that sweet, it is certainly less sweet than a Creme Egg. I would say the taste is more in line with the Kinder family of products, sweet vanilla milk, but with a texture all it's own. The texture is so nice, it is like whipped mousse, extremely light on your tongue and almost foamy. I was surprised by the texture, as it actually looked pretty dense when I first opened it up. They aren't chintzy with it, either. The egg is filled up to the chocolate cap you bite off with the stuff.

I think eating the filling by the spoonful is actually a bit much, even though it is fun and a super cute novelty, the taste is a bit better when you have a bit of each. In the end, I ate the middle bits of the cream and left the sides untouched so when I ate the chocolate shell, there was also some filling.

I'm so glad this is out in the UK, it is so well presented and very cute, in addition to being tasty.  I think the price point is a bit much at £2.00, and I foresee a lot of these being unsold after Easter, but I'm glad I got to try it and would gladly buy it is a little gift for my family at Easter, too. I'm debating whether or not to try the chocolate cream one as well...wish they sold them in a mixed container. Maybe next year!

Sioux City Cherries 'n' Mint Soda

Here's one more crazy soda I picked up from Cybercandy! This one sounded particularly wacky to me.

 

This bottle has got me feeling mighty patriotic, what with the soaring eagle and the...red and green color scheme. That green is nearly the exact color of a dollar bill, actually... America.

I usually hate the taste of mint drinks, I had a bad experience with some unintentionally minty water as a youth, the classic 'someone left their gum inside the cap' jape. It was disgusting, I hated thinking that what was supposed to be my refreshing glug was actually more or less the backwash of someone who left a wad of chewed stuff behind, in my water bottle. After that, I also tried some kind of purposefully mint water and all it did was remind me of my past... So, I didn't really expect to enjoy this drink, but it was just too strange to pass up.

The color is a very transparent pinky-red that pleasantly clashes with the color of the text on the bottle. The fizz factor is light, just the way I like it--not bubbly all the way down your throat, just an initial burst.

It didn't smell or taste too strongly of mint, it mostly tasted like cherry juice. Don't get me wrong, the mint is definitely there, but it is a refreshing herbal mint rather than cloying peppermint. I think that is what makes the difference between a good minty drink, and a bad minty drink. It needs to be not that sweet, and erring on the side of herbal.

My drinking partner thought this tasted like Dr Pepper Cherry with some mint. I don't know where he gets this stuff sometimes...to be fair, it was the littlest bit spicy like Dr. Pepper, but I think that had more to do with it not being a very sweet soda in general.

If you like cherry soda this would be a fun one to try for a change, even if you're not that into mint.

Long Grove Chocolates, Peanut Butter Cup

Now I'm not prone to cussing or overexaggeration, but this is one big ass peanut butter cup, seriously.

You may not know it looking at that picture, sure- it is just the wrapper and there is no scale, for all you know it is your average work-a-day peanut butter cup, gets ya from point A to point B, no big deal. You'd be wrong, though. Dead wrong.

Pictured, one average sized human hand, palming a massive piece of candy as if it is a basketball about to be dunked or Globetrotter'd.

I don't have freaky little cat paws, I've got a normal sized hand, so hopefully that gives you some idea of the scale on this thing.

This on the other hand is a tiny plate, but just take a look at that. That is a nice peanut butter to chocolate ratio, rare among gigantic filled chocolates. I'm loving it so far. It was wrapped in two layers, one clingy foil layer and an outermost cupcake paper. It is easily the size of a standard cupcake, by the way.

The smell was very similar to Reese's-- nutty, milky chocolate. The chocolate was above-average for American milk chocolate, but would probably seem a bit waxy to the European palette. It doesn't have that nice creamy melt like you get in basically all chocolate here, it kind of sticks around in your mouth, thick and sweet. Let's be real though, you ain't here for the chocolate.

Everyone has a baseline familiarity with Reese's, right? Crumbly, salty, and a bit grainy? That's what I was expecting in this cup, but it wasn't much like that. This is a lot more like peanut butter fudge, very smooth with no graininess, and more sweet than salty. If you've had a good block of peanut butter fudge, you'll know exactly how it tastes. Really, it is very similar in taste to smooth peanut butter, but thickened up with sugar to a fudgey texture--so smooth!

I bought this at Cybercandy, it was on clearance after Christmas to a little over £2.00...I'd buy it again for that price as it was a fun little snack to share with my husband.

Sprecher Red Apple Soda

Another of the fanciful sodas I bought from Cybercandy, this one purports to be red apple flavored, as opposed to your run-of-the-mill green apple soda.  Which... actually, I suppose is a bit run-of-the-mill here, isn't it? What with your Tangos and your Appletizers and all.

In the USA any kind of apple soda would seem quite novel, and I can only guess that it is because other apple drinks are so ubiquitous.

When I was in elementary school, we were served these squat little foil-topped cups of grape and apple juice, and they didn't taste very nice at all...kinda metallic and extremely sweet, like someone dropped a penny in some flat soda. It took me years to accept apple juice and apple cider as potentially tasty drinks, and I still don't trust any grape juice within 20 feet of me.

So, this soda tasted a bit like those apple juice cups, except in a much cuter package with some fizz.


The label really make me think of an artisanal beer, with the gothic font and bright graphics... which makes sense because Sprecher also produces such beers.

 
Cute little fella (I'm assuming Jeckle), hiding out behind some apples. Very autumnal!

The color of the soda was intense, really was like the color of a candy apple or a freezy pop's liquid--a real lip stainer. I was really surprised by that, because the soda otherwise seemed to be quite natural. For instance, raw honey was used as a sweetener.

The flavor was even more intense, and while my husband thought it was pretty nice, I thought it tasted just like a candle. It was SO intense, like a red apple-scented candle had coated itself in a fine sugar and launched into your mouth, unprovoked. My other half thought it just tasted like a red apple version of Appletiser, and remained neutral during my lambasts.

 It definitely tasted like a red apple, not tart or tangy, just sweet and...apple-y. Like apple juice, except bright red, quite sweet, and extremely fragrant. It was not the most disgusting thing I've ever eaten, and I did my part to polish off the whole 16oz bottle, but I would not be picking this one up again. I just can't imagine anyone liking red apples this much. I'd definitely try a different Sprecher, though! I like the idea of raw honey as a sweetener, even though the bright red coloring kind of eliminated the healthy soda angle.