Ben & Jerry's Cookie Core Ice Cream

Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream is one of the most indulgent makes of ice cream out there. They always seem to go that extra mile to add extra flavours, textures and surprises to their ice creams and the new Cookie Core range is definitely taking ice cream luxury to a whole new level.

What-a-Lotta Chocolate, Utter Peanut Butter Clutter and Speculoos? Specu-Love Cookie Cores have hit the supermarket frozen aisles and I was delighted to be offered the chance of trying some. Who could say no to Ben and Jerry's?!

The 500ml ice creams have a core of crumbly cookie running through the centre of the pot. It is a bit like a soft cheesecake base with a slightly crunchy, dense texture. It's a whole new way to eat cookies.

The three flavours available in the UK are:

Utter Peanut Butter Clutter: Peanut butter ice cream with peanut butter cookies & a crumbled peanut butter cookie core.

What-a-Lotta Chocolate: Chocolate ice cream with chocolate cookies and a crumbled chocolate cookie core.

Speculoos? Specu-Love: Caramel ice cream with traditional spiced Speculoos cookies and a crumbled, caramelised cookie core.

I tried the What-A-Lotta Chocolate flavour. It is rich and intense, definitely one for chocoholics! The core is thick and flavoursome with the slight crunch of a crumbled cookie. It is much like the consistency of the pieces in their Cookie Dough ice cream, but on a bigger scale! Crunchy pieces of chocolate cookie are studded through the ice cream giving a really full on chocolatey experience.

My daughter Ella is a huge fan of the Utter Peanut Butter Clutter variety, which is perfect for lovers of PB! I like the slight saltiness contrasted with the creaminess of the ice cream, and the peanut butter cookie core is lush. It is such an inventive and delicious combination.

Not only do Ben and Jerry make the most incredible ice cream creations, they do it in the most sustainable way using Fairtrade ingredients, responsibly sourced packaging and their Caring Dairy initiative. I am super excited to have read that Ben and Jerry's are planning to make a non-dairy ice cream suitable for vegans. I certainly hope that this is right and a vegan version of this iconic brand becomes available in the UK in the near future. That would be incredible!

You can find Ben & Jerry's Cookie Cores 500ml  in supermarkets for £4.99 RRP.
Find out more at : www.benjerry.co.uk

Adventures at the Cheshire Ice Cream Farm #countrykids

We spent a lovely few hours today at one of our favourite places, Cheshire Farm  - The Ice Cream Farm.  It is completely free to enter to see the animals and use the huge range of outdoor play equipment.  Other outdoor activities cost just £1 making it a very affordable day out. (There is also a huge indoor soft play area and a Games Loft which cost extra.) And of course there is the ice cream parlour with over forty flavours of ice cream to choose from!

Here is what we got up to...

Hopscotch.

Crazy golf which costs just £1 for nine holes and was great fun!  We even got some holes in one!

Quad Bikes which are £1 for two laps.  Freddy loved this.

the kids played on the outdoor wooden play equipment, great for testing your balance.

Kizzy tried out the Monkey Bars!!

Freddy was happy to get a helping hand from his big sister!

Swinging.

More swinging!

Freddy enjoyed practicing his skills on a digger. (£1)

Panning for Gold for £1.  We found Fool's Gold, Rose Quartz, Tiger Eye, Agate and Jasper which was bagged up for us to take home.

And of course we had to have an ice cream cone each...Raspberry Pavlova for Fred and Chocolate Fudge Cookie for Kizzy!

It is a lovely place for some outdoor fun for my Country Kids!

Ice Cream Chokablok with Good Stuff

When I took a delivery of a sample of Chokabloks new flavoured ice creams, I was ridiculously excited, although it meant I had to do an emergency re-jig of my freezer to fit all the tubs in. But who's complaining, I'm happy to consign a shelf over to frozen dairy desserts!  I have a real passion for ice-cream...it is one of the foods that is worth its weight in calories!

Chokablok is a premium, luxury ice-cream brand with flavours chok-full of the finest, best quality ingredients.  Available in 500ml tubs, Chokablok ice cream is a real grown-up indulgence.  Each spoonful features more chewy bits, gooey bits and crunchy bits than any other ice cream.

The Chokablok on Sticks are the perfect handheld treats with just the right amount of premium ice cream crammed with yummy bits and smothered in Belgian milk choocolate.

The two latest flavours in the Chokablok range are Peanut Butter Nutter and The Rocky Road of Love.

Peanut Butter Nutter 

ChokaBlok’s expert ‘cremeliers’ have concocted a real first – a mouth-watering combination of chocolate and peanut butter ice-cream, packed with milk chocolate covered peanuts, rich caramel sauce and real milk chocolate drops.
I am nutty for nuts in ice cream.  It is my favourite addition to my favourite dessert.  Peanut Butter Nutter did not disappoint in that department with a generous quantity of crunchy nuts in each serving.  It isn't an overly sweet ice cream, so it tastes really grown-up.  The crunchy chocolate coated nuts contrast nicely with the dark chocolate and peanut butter ice creams.  I didn't detect too much caramel sauce and confess to serving it with a spoonful of Dulce de Leche which worked perfectly.


The Rocky Road of Love


This ice cream is for true romantics: made of a heavenly combination of rich chocolate and marshmallow ice creams, it comes packed the brim with real milk chocolate hearts, bites of crunchy biscuit, mini marshmallows and generous swirls of sticky toffee sauce.  It is cute and colourful and made my daughter squeal with delight. She loved the chocolate hearts and the crunchy biscuits.  The combination was lovely!


The ice creams benefit from sitting out of the freezer for a few minutes before serving.  The flavours intensify as they soften at room temperature.  These ice creams will impress guests at dinner parties or make a perfect indulgent treat for yourself.

The new tubs of Peanut Butter Nutter and The Rocky Road of Love join the five existing members of the ChokaBlok family: Billionaires Shortcake, Gold Diggers Dynamite, Cookie Dough Mon-Star, Cherry Bomb Brownie and The Chocolate Extremist.

Peanut Butter Nutter, The Rocky Road of Love and ChokaBlok on Sticks are now available in Tesco stores nationwide. Bloks of ChokaBlok are priced at £3.99 RRP. ChokaBlok on Sticks are priced at £2.79.

Wordless Wednesday

Day 9

Silent Sunday - Ice Cream

 

Making Ice Cream at Cheshire Farm

Back in the Summer my 8 year old daughter Kizzy entered a competition at the Cheshire Farm Ice Cream factory, to invent your own, brand new flavour of ice cream.  Her entry was a combination of mango, pineapple, banana and orange, with swirls of fruit puree running through it.  We were totally delighted when her flavour was chosen and we were invited to go to the factory to help make a batch.

Thankfully, the weather today did not prevent us from making the journey to Cheshire and we arrived to be greeted by the director Jonathan.  We donned paper coats, shoe covers and hair nets ready to enter the factory.  Everyone was lovely and had made such an effort to make Kizzy's experience an unforgettable one.  Pots of fruit concentrates were lined up on the counter for her to sniff and identify.  The orange was amazingly pungent!  Kizzy was then invited to create her flavour by adding concentrates to the base mix of milk (fresh from the farm cows yesterday), cream and sugar.  She took great delight in dolloping and pouring the fruit, while her sister Ella mixed it with a big whisk.  After some taste tests, she came up with the perfect mix!

This bucketful of fruity goodness was poured into the bespoke ice cream making machine and Kizzy pushed the button to begin the freezing process!  It was surprisingly quick...just long enough for Kizzy to put the personalised stickers on the lids of her 2 litre tubs.  The filling of the tubs was a lot of fun.  Armed with her specialist tool (aka a wallpaper scraper), Kizzy scraped the splodging ice cream flat and swirled in fruit purees to make ripples of orange sauce.  She experimented with peach and passionfruit purees too, making six 2 litre tubs of her own bespoke Ice Cream!

The highlight for me was when, armed with a spoon, we were allowed to scrape out the remnants of the ice cream machine.  The freshly frozen, fruity ice cream was refreshing, tangy and creamy all at once.  A real triumph!  Kizzy absolutely loved making the ice cream and enjoyed being given the freedom to experiment and get creative.  We felt how Charlie must have felt in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. 

We were given six tubs of the rippled fruity ice creams which we look forward to sharing with family and friends.  We were already big fans of the Cheshire Farm Ice Cream, we love it even more now!