NEW for 2011 : Ben & Jerry's Red Velvet Cake An Ice Cream Review

I'm not sure if I've ever had red velvet cake, and if I did, it was once, but I am about to go ahead and try red velvet cake ice cream from Ben & Jerry's. Wish me luck.

Now there are two things that scare me here, cake batter and cream cheese, but Rodzilla gave this a pretty high grade so we're going to give it a try. We've got red velvet cake batter ice cream with red velvet cake pieces & a cream cheese frosting swirl. Hmmmm:

Red velvet? ok...
Cake batter? cake batter is always too sweet...
Cake pieces? hopefully ok...
Cream cheese frosting? wait, what? oh, apparently that's come with red velvet cake...

Hmmm, well this looks promising. It looks like strawberry ice cream with frosting and strawberry cake bits. Ok, you never really see strawberry cake, but... well, now I want strawberry cake and it doesn't exist! Sorry, hungry. Nothing like a ton of cake bits to get the mojo started.

I dig in and I taste... well, I taste a fairly sweet cake batter and I definitely taste the cream cheese way more than I expected too. We've got our typical ben & jerry's quality and texture, but the cake batter and cream cheese seem to be battling it out for top flavor with every scoop. Yeah, I'm not real sure how I feel about this because I'm not a huge fan of either flavor.

I like the grit that the cake pieces add, but I'm not sure I can tell the difference between their sweetness and that of the ice cream and swirl. Granted it's usually hard to tell the difference between any ice cream and cake mix-in, so this isn't a surprise.

On my first good size sampling, the cream cheese flavor really got stuck on my taste buds and I couldn't shake it, even when I was done. For my second scoop, I just had a small sample with more of a back and forth between the two flavors, but I'm still not really enjoying it. I decided to call it quits and let my wife finish the pint. I knew she would enjoy way more than I would.

Look, I'm not going to lie and say I like cake batter flavor. Only in the most perfect of circumstances am I even remotely amused by it. Sure, I licked my fair share of mixing spoons as a kid, but I find cake batter ice cream too sweet and too strong. That said, B&J did a pretty good job of trying to keep the c.b. flavor in check. I also would have preferred a bit less cream cheese swirl. Finally, take the overall sweetness and robustness down a notch or two and I might consider a second pint.

This one's for you cake batter lovers, enjoy!