The Guilty Pleasure: Ben & Jerry's Cookie Core ice cream Where to Get It: In theory, your favorite grocery. In practice, I've only seen it at Walmart. Price: About $4, same as all the other Ben & Jerry's flavors wherever you buy them. What it Really Costs: Three times the calories to find your favorite. And entering Walmart.
Ben & Jerry's has long been a standard bearer for guilty pleasure sweets. I know it's my ice cream of choice if I'm curling up on the couch with a bad movie after a rough day.
I love that even though the eponymous duo doesn't have a hand in day-to-day operations of the company, Ben & Jerry's still has some of the most fun and innovative flavors on the market.
See Also: Cookies and Creme Cookie Butter Might Be the Most Addictive Thing at Trader Joe's
Last year, they unveiled a new Cores line of ice cream. Each pint has two flavors of ice cream side by side, with a core of a soft ingredient (such as fudge or caramel) running straight down the center of the carton.
They were enough of a hit that this year, Ben & Jerry's has expanded the Cores line to now have cores made out of one of my very favorite indulgences, cookie butter. Just what I needed, another way to consume cookie butter. I mean, besides my usual way, licking it directly off of a spoon.
There are three Cookie Cores flavors for your scooping pleasure. Spectacular Speculoos is the one with classic Biscoff-style cookie butter, surrounded by vanilla and caramel ice creams studded with speculoos cookie bits (in case you aren't familiar, speculoos is a spiced cookie that most Americans would recognize as the cookie you get with your coffee when flying on Delta). Boom Chocolatta! (their exclamation point, not mine) features mocha and caramel ice creams with chocolate cookies and fudge flakes with a chocolate cookie butter core. Finally, Peanut Buttah is all about peanut butter and peanut butter cookies, with peanut butter ice cream, peanut butter sugar bits, peanut butter cookie chunks, and peanut butter cookie butter.
Do they deliver? Of course they do! Ben & Jerry's is fantastic ice cream, cookie butter is a fantastic treat, it only figures that when Ben & Jerry's makes an ice cream involving cookie butter that the results are dangerous to waistlines everywhere. The two varieties that I tried (the peanut butter has proven elusive; let me know if you find some around the Phoenix area, will you?) have both become two of my favorite Ben & Jerry's flavors, if not ice cream flavors overall.
Which one of the chocolate and speculoos is my favorite? Don't make me pick. I was alternating back and forth between both pints trying to select a winner, and found that both had their charms. Boom Chocolatta! is the more intense, with dark chocolate and coffee flavors; Spectacular Speculoos had more subtle charms that were equally alluring in their own way.
It's a winner no matter which you pick. I guess the question is whether you're more in the mood for chocolate or caramelized spice. I'll just buy both. And then top it off with the peanut butter one whenever I manage to track it down.
