The Good: Surprisingly nutritious on some unexpected fronts.
The Bad: Nothing exceptional on the taste front, More expensive than other ice creams.
The Basics: Ben & Jerry’s Cotton Candy Ice Cream is a limited batch ice cream that is not as distinctive as most of their regular ice cream flavors.
Summer is here and that means that I am picking up my reviews of ice creams. So, I was thrilled when I discovered that Ben & Jerry’s has two new Limited Edition flavors! The first one I picked up for my wife and I to enjoy was Cotton Candy. It was our first choice because she absolutely loves cotton candy. Unfortunately, the Cotton Candy Limited Edition Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream does not taste much like actual cotton candy. The lack of a distinctive and accurate flavor drags this offering down quite a bit.
Basics
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream comes in a pint container. The Cotton Candy Ice Cream is a mostly smooth ice cream with lots of sprinkles throughout it. In fact, there were almost no spoonfuls of the ice cream that lacked sprinkles.
At (locally) $5.99 a pint, the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is an expensive ice cream. While this might not have an accurate flavor, it is made of decent ingredients, though it is not worth the price. In fact, this is a Limited Edition flavor that shouldn’t be added to the regular line-up of Ben & Jerry’s ice creams.
Ease Of Preparation
The Cotton Candy Ice Cream is a lightly loaded ice cream. As an ice cream, preparation is ridiculously simple: one need only open the top of the container, scoop out a half cup and consume! There is no trick to preparing or eating the Cotton Candy Ice Cream!
Taste
Rather oddly, when it is very frozen, the Cotton Candy ice cream smells like pie crust! As the ice cream warms a little bit, it begins to smell like cake or, more accurately, the concentrated scent of sprinkles.
On the taste front, Cotton Candy ice cream is surprisingly bland. It tastes very much like vanilla, without a strong or distinctive flavor of cotton candy. Instead, the alleged flavor of cotton candy seems to come from the sprinkles found throughout the ice cream. Sadly, though, this ice cream’s sprinkles do not enhance the flavor much. They add a firm texture, but not much to the flavor palate. As the ice cream and sprinkles warm, their flavor blends slightly and the resulting taste is the exact flavor of milkshakes, well, the fake ones, like a McDonald’s milkshake.
This has a vaguely sweet aftertaste that lingers for about a minute after the ice cream is gone.
Nutrition
The Ben & Jerry’s Cotton Candy Ice Cream is a fairly heavy ice cream with light additives. The pint represents four half-cup servings. In the half-cup serving, there are 230 calories, 110 of which are from fat. The twelve grams of fat represent 18% of the RDA of fat, with 35% of one’s RDA of saturated fat coming in the 7 grams of saturated fat in this ice cream. One serving has 65 mg of cholesterol (that’s 22% of the RDA!) and 50 mg of Sodium (2% RDA). The only other real nutrients are four grams of protein and 10% of the RDA of Calcium and 8% of the RDA of Vitamin A in the Cotton Candy Ice Cream.
Ben & Jerry’s has decent ingredients, too. Made primarily of Cream, Skim milk, and water! There is nothing unpronounceable in the ingredients list. The Cotton Candy Ben & Jerry’s is Kosher, but not marked as gluten free. As well, there are allergy warnings on the package for soy, tree nuts, and sesame.
Storage/Clean-Up
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is both a frozen and a dairy product, so it is pretty obvious that it must be kept frozen in order to remain viable. Kept frozen it remains fresh for months my pint had an expiration date of November 12, 2014.
The Cotton Candy ice cream is fairly heavy, but the candy sprinkles might stain if they warm up if the ice cream is sitting out. As well, when the ice cream melts and gets onto fabrics, it will require one to wash it right out. On nonporous surfaces, the ice cream wipes off exceptionally easily.
Overall
The Ben & Jerry’s Cotton Candy ice cream is utterly underwhelming and it’s one of the few flavors of Ben & Jerry’s not even worth trying.
For other Ben & Jerry’s ice creams, be sure to visit my reviews of:
New York Super Fudge Chunk
Cheesecake Brownie
Willie Nelson's Country Peach Cobbler
3.5/10
For other food reviews, please visit my Food Review Index Page for an organized listing!
© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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