Saturday Night Showdown with the new kid on the freezer block - Yoplait!

[Discontinued] Good evening ladies and gentlemen. If you have been following our facebook feed then you know that I discovered a new contender in the frozen yogurt scene, and his name is Yoplait. They've jumped on the frozen yogurt bandwagon in a big way, but rather than putting the new kid up against an experienced challenger, we're going to make him battle himself first.

You see, Yoplait has come out swinging hard. Oh sure, TCBY broke out before summer with their introduction into the freezer aisle, but this didn't really shock me as much as this did because they are boldly attacking both the froyo and Greek froyo trend at the same time. I don't think anyone else has tried that yet, at least not in my neck of the woods.

Now, there is one strange thing I should mention before we proceed. Yoplait isn't really talking about these new products yet. There is no mention of it on their website yet, though I did find this lone September 16th facebook post that mentions 7 pints + 2 bars of froyo & 7 pints + 2 bars of greek froyo - they don't specifically list the flavors though, so let me do it for them:

Regular Froyo Bars in Harvest Peach and Strawberry Banana.

Greek Froyo Bars in Honey Caramel and Raspberry.

Greek Froyo Pints in Vanilla, Peach, Strawberry, Black Cherry, Honey Caramel, Raspberry Fig and Blueberry --- Regular Froyo Pints in vanilla, harvest peach, strawberry, cherry orchard, strawberry banana, mixed berry, and mountain berry. $2.98

Throwback Thursday Review with Edy's Grand Cookies 'n Cream Ice Cream

During the Blue Bunny Neopolitan review, you might remember I said we would be getting back to basics around here. Oh, they'll be plenty of new flavors, but as the year winds down and we fill in the gaps of our new product knowledge, there's a bit of time to cover some classics. I was trying to think of a something a little catchier then back to basics and Nick suggested Throwback Thursday. Hmmm, not bad, let me just do a quick internet search on it.... darn it, that term is already kind of bouncing around a bit isn't it? Awww geez, even Perry's Ice Cream just beat us to the punch - check out this post labeled Throwback Thursday from earlier today. Oh well, let's join the #throwbackthursday crowd!

To me, very few things are more classic (or sacred) than cookies 'n cream. This is a simple flavor to make yet all too often gets messed up. Overall I have fond memories of Edy's CnC, it's just always been a nice reliable flavor. I'm pretty sure I plowed through more than my fair share of CnC half gallons in college.

Lifeway Foods Frozen Kefir Reviews

[By Nick] Have you ever heard of, let alone tried, kefir? I know I hadn’t until around a year ago. My friend had made a homemade version of it in frozen form and invited me over to try it. From what I recall, it was okay but nothing earth shattering. I actually forgot all about it until Dubba offered me the opportunity to sample a line of frozen kefir from Lifeway Foods.

To give you a little background on what kefir is I’ll let Lifeway describe it for you. “Kefir is a cultured probiotic beverage similar in taste and texture to drinkable yogurt, and made from milk fermented with kefir cultures. Originating over 2000 years ago in the Caucasus Mountains-where many people live well over 100 years - kefir has been associated with a long list of health benefits.” From what I was told from my friend, it’s originally a drinkable tangier cousin of yogurt with a lot more positive health benefits.

Lifeway Frozen Kefir : Mango, Dulce de Leche, and Pumpkin

Ben & Jerry's Key Lime Pie A Limited Edition Ice Cream Review

At first I was afraid, I was petrified

Kept thinkin' I didnt want that Key Lime Pie by my side;

But then I spent so many nights thinkin' how I might be wrong

And I grew strong and I learned how to get along

Friendly's SundaeXtreme Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough - A Frozen Dairy Dessert Review

Well hello there. The plan this past sunday was to do a very special "Extreme Sundae Sunday" starring one of Friendly's SundaeXtreme flavors.... that was until I got the evil super bug from wherever that has inspired a week long cough. Grrrrrrr. The worst part is my daughter then got sicker than I did with the same menace.

So Sundae Sunday was cancelled, but the ice cream lived on and was easily devoured. Let's take a look at what would have been - Friendly's SundaeXtreme Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough which is billed as Vanilla Flavored Frozen Dairy Dessert with Cookie Dough Pieces, Semi-sweet chocolate chips and Cookie Dough Swirl. They had me with the cookie dough part so let's dig in.

Bart's Homemade Deep Purple Cow Ice Cream Review

Have you ever had Bart's? No? Didn't think so, not unless you live in the Massachusetts area. Apparently Bart's is "Massachusett's finest homemade super premium ice cream since 1976". Funny, I've lived here a long time and only just now have I finally had a pint of Bart's. I won't get into too many details since they are pretty localized, but basically Bart's super premium pints and Snow's Half Gallons come from the same factory in Greenfield, MA and they've been doing so for quite some time.

Deep Purple Cow? Since Purple Cow is black raspberry and chocolate chips, Deep Purple Cow is black raspberry with white and dark chocolate chips. As a lover of black raspberry ice cream, I feel a bit uninformed and needed to do a quick google search about this.... Funny, all my search results are for Emack & Bolio's Deep Purple Cow flavor and no one else seems to make it.

TCBY Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough Frozen Yogurt

[By Nick] I have a confession to make: I have never been to a TCBY. Sure I've been to various soft serve froyo places but I've never tried the self-proclaimed country’s best yogurt. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against TCBY. It's just that up until recently, there hasn't been a TCBY even remotely close to me.

I still haven't visited this new store but I've noticed that their products are showing up more and more in the freezer aisle. Seeing as how I should at least give them a shot, I decided to pick up a pint of their cookie dough frozen yogurt.

Graeter's Peppermint Stick Ice Cream

I know it's way too early for a Christmas post, and I had every intention of going for a choco-pb fix first from my nice selection of free pints from Graeter's, but something about this pint just spoke to me the other night. It's just such a tasteful ode to what should be the most joyous time of year.

That reminds me, only 101 days til Christmas

See! Isn't that pretty? You have to be a stone cold grinch to not do a double take. We've got subtle snowflakes, peppermint bits, and I even like the fading peppermint stripes. Oh, plus it says "limited edition". Win, win win.

Oreo - The September 2012 Blizzard of the Month and Buy 1 Get 1 99 cent blizzards

Ok, so as you all know, the "Blizzard of the Month" is the Oreo blizzard. Sure, DQ is trying to pay their respects to a classic blizzard, but it seems like such a cop out. Nick was thinking they could at least throw some sprinkles in there so we know it's a birthday blizzard....

They need to do something.... but if they refuse, then I guess it's time to do it myself then.

This is an Oreo Cookie Dough Blizzard. It mixes the lovely crunch and flavor of the Oreo blizzard with the nice textural changes of cookie dough bits. The downside here is that there's not really any cookie dough flavor happening. The Oreo side wins on this one.

This is an Reese's Oreo Blizzard and oh did I have high hopes for this one. I was envisioning something along the lines of the new peanut butter Oreos, but unfortunately Reese's have such a unique flavor that they totally overtake this treat. Oh, it was still tasty, and I got a nice chunk of Oreo now and then, but the Oreo flavor is totally lost. Reese's wins this battle.

Note: the employee tempted me with a second 99 cent blizzard (a la the current DQ commercials), but I'm just not man enough to handle 2 blizzards in one lunch time (though I will admit, I was tempted to have two minis). B1G1-99 lasts through September 23rd.

So with the battle of the double mix-ins currently tied at one to one, feel free to chime in with any combos you think I should go for before the month is over. Sure we've had the Oreo Cookie Jar Blizzard, Mint Oreo Blizzard, Oreo Brownie Blizzard, and even the Strawberry Golden Oreo Blizzard, but what would you create when you are limited to what's currently on the menu?

Beach Sundae Sunday with Smuckers S'mores Magic Shell

Happy Sunday Sundae everyone! If you missed the last Sundae Sunday, let me just say that the idea is to just turn everything off and take a nice half hour or 45 minute break with the family. There's just so many distractions nowadays and ice cream is a nice way to get away from it all. My daughter loves setting up the dining room, I'll do the scooping, and in general it's a nice break (especially on a cool but sunny afternoon).

The guest of honor at today's Sundae Sunday is Smuckers S'mores Magic Shell which was originally released in 2009. Oh, and yes, those are Lego cops from the early 70s telling you to stop and take a break. We've also got mini marshmallows, sprinkles, whip cream, and some mini chocolate chips. (I forgot the mini Keebler cookies, little buggers are still fresh too).

My daughter wanted in on the lego action. 

She's been having fun reassembling all the castle legos today.

It wouldn't be beach sundaes without the beach!

(Hopefully you got one of these from Friendly's before they ran out)

My daughter wasn't in the mood to try the magic shell, but it still looks good!
(notice the marshmallows hiding in the lid)

SQUIRT! On goes the very liquidy magic shell.

Notice how it's pooling at the bottom.

Hopefully you can see how thick and hard the shell has become.

I had fairly low expectations for the shell after trying the cupcake magic shell and wasting the orange cream magic shell. However, it was pretty good. It was way thicker than I expected and it just felt really neat on top of my cold cold Breyers Neapolitan ice cream. The marshmallow and graham flavors were pretty well hidden, but there was that overall taste that this wasn't just some simple milk chocolate, it was more complex than that. So overall I'll give it a positive review. There's no harm in spending two bucks to try it out. The only real problem I had was the fact that it wound up solidifying to the bottom of my bowl.

oh, yeah, that was my shiny Ben & Jerry's ice cream scoop on the left side of the first photo there. I can't believe I've waited over two years to open the silly thing. Oh did it make today that much easier to scoop.

Mmmm, and sundae sunday is over and I must say my bowl of ice cream hit the spot, well, everything but the gummy marshmallows, I'll just never get into those in my ice cream.

Have a good week everyone.

Magic Shell Verdict?  Fun
Buy this brand Again?  Ya, I'll keep going

Three Twins Sea Salted Caramel Ice Cream Review

Let's start with a quick recap: Three Twins is a west coast ice cream company churning out premium organic ice cream. They have several locations as well as 13 prepackaged flavors. The owner was nice enough to send me a few coupons to try out their stuff now that they've gone national with the help of Whole Foods grocery stores. First I dug into their very respectable vanilla bean flavor, and now it's time for flavor #2.

Funny, I just noticed it says sea SALTED caramel (as opposed to sea SALT caramel). I like the description too "an alchemy of cream and sugar that's worth its taste in gold". Now that's just some snazzy wordsmithin'.  --- If it's too snazzy for you, it says "organic caramel ice cream" underneath. Nice touch three twins. I love a good description, but a backup straightforward description is a nice little touch.

Babcock Hall's Mocha Macchiato Ice Cream Review

[By Nick] Back when I purchased Babcock Hall’s Mint Chocolate Cookie, I also added their Mocha Macchiato to my order. You guys know I’m iffy on both coffee and mint flavored ice cream but Babcock Hall regularly rotates those flavors so I was allured into trying their current options.

According to ice cream source it’s just coffee ice cream with chocolate in it but scanning over the ingredients list there is also mention of caramel in the mix. Now I’m a big fan of caramel so I’m excited to open this pint up and see what is truly going on in there.

Blue Bunny Premium Neapolitan Ice Cream Review

Now I may have mentioned this before, but my daughter is on a bit of an ice cream overdose right now. She's gotten tired of the fancy schmancy pints and really just wants to go back to the basics of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry (and cookie dough... and cookies n cream...). Anyway, this review will be part of our underlying back to basics series as we intermix all the awesome pints that keep showing up on my doorstep with some of the classics we all rely on from time to time.

This is Blue Bunny Premium Neopolitan Ice Cream. I emphasize Premium because I didn't realize that they also make Original Neopolitan Ice Cream which has a little less fat, a little less sugar, and comes in an old school rectangular cardboard container (sorry, it's not a half gallon).

Pudding and the 90 minute diet

"90 minute diet?" you ask. Well, it's a term I decided to coin one morning last week and it's got two simple rules. 1) Eat less. 2) Pace food breaks at least 90 minutes apart. For example, right now I am eating my lunch, and in 90 minutes I'm going to go take a stroll around the grocery store and pick myself up a pint of something frozen and tasty some new jell-o.

When I was at Walmart two weeks ago and saw some new puddings, I thought "oh boy, new flavors!". At some point after calming down, I started thinking "ummm, why are they coming up with new flavors now?", especially after theimpulsivebuy posted a shot of all six new flavors. Well a little more shopping on Monday made me realize that the new puddings are here so that you (the parent) can shove them in your kid's lunchbox. It's all so clear to me now.

So here is the Jell-o Strawberry Shortcake. I take a scoop from the "plain white" pudding but it ain't so plain. It's already got a bit of strawberry frosting type flavoring in it. I should have tried a bit of the topping to, but I was in a rush to see just how red the pudding would get when mixed with the bits.

Well it's not red, but it's definitely pink. I try a bite and it bites back. I try some more and think it's not so bad. It's a small container so I take small bites until I get about 70% done. That's about when I've decided I've had enough of this overly sweet treat. I like strawberry flavored things but this one is just yuck. It may not be a super artificial taste, but it's definitely unsettling. Maybe if you spread this on some angel food cake it might be kind of neat, but otherwise I would avoid this one.

On Second Scoop: Ahhh, at least my daughter liked it

Well I didn't plan on trying Turtle Sundae Jell-o next, but after a failed ice cream run, it seemed like a decent alternative. It sure beats trying the birthday cake flavor (what? I'm afraid of cake flavors ok, at least I can admit it)

Hmm, flavored base, caramel syrup...

and a neat little mix of almonds, pecans, and mini chocolate chips.

Mix them together and you have a neat little treat. It's got that same weird funky poofy fake feel to it all, but whereas I gave up on the shortcake, I kept going on this one. The flavor thankfully overrides the funk on this one. (side note: tiny pudding snack doesn't really keep me full for 90+ minutes, more like 5)

On Second Scoop: Fun to try, but I doubt the re-buy

Jell-o Oreo Dirt Cup. I expect chocolate with some Oreo crunch and some purty rainbow snowflakes to boot. What could go wrong? Well, those cute colorful little stars could be way to crunchy. There seem to be a multitude of them in every bite and it's really ruining what should have been an awesome chocolate cookies 'n cream vibe. I would have preferred soft flowers that were seen and not heard. Oh well, guess we're going 0-3 on these new puddings.

The flavors I haven't shown are birthday cake, german chocolate cake, and banana caramel pie.

Ok, technically the next two things aren't pudding, but they serve the same purpose.

I was actually really excited when the new YoCrunch Apple Pie Parfait came out at the beginning of the year. I've actually already bought these once before.... and then lost them in the back of the fridge until they passed their expiration date. I finally went back and purchased them again but unfortunately it wasn't really worth the wait or the repurchase. Oh, it's not bad, but it's not that exciting as a snack for me, especially in this tiny size --- hahaha, just realized that the original packaging didn't have the stars & stripes (see my photo here)

On Second Scoop: On a very sad note, I yet again let 2 of the 4 go past the expiration date. I know, I'm slackin, but it's not a total loss. I swiped the crunchies from the tossed parfaits and threw them in my raspberry yoplait yogurt. It was surprisingly good in an almost raspberry cheesecake kind of way. Not sure how that happens but obviously there's a bit of flavor magic going on here. It's a shame you can't just buy a box of crunchies and add them to whatever flavor of yogurt you prefer.

New for 2012 it's the Motts Applesauce version of Yocrunch. I decided to have one as a dinner appetizer and it wasn't bad. The yogurt had a bit of a bite to it and then that was actually emphasized when I mixed in the applesauce. I can't say I'm a huge fan of the dried apple bits. Sometimes they are crunchy, but sometimes that are kind of cardboard like. Overall these don't do a whole lot for me, though I'm pretty sure I cant pawn them off on my daughter.

small aside here: I am a massive fruit snack addict nowadays. I keep a nice supply of Welch's fruit snacks in my snack bag because I find them tasty but also the least sticky of all the fruit snack brands. Well, General Mills has two new branded fruit snacks out for the start of school. On the left is are Mott's Medleys. These surprisingly aint bad considering they use carrot juice (pear, apple, carrot to be precise). Then we have Ocean Spray branded gummies. Now Ocean Spray is known for cranberries so these mix in cranberry juice (apple, pear, cranberry). They are also pretty tasty. Both varieties are somewhat soft and a bit sticky, but it's nice to have some more varieties and flavors to choose from. They certainly taste better than those super sticky Star Wars fruit snacks I bought awhile back.

Ok, let's get back to the pudding. Kozy Shack is also getting into the new fall pudding season.

First off is the very happily decorated All Natural Gluten Free Kozy Shack Soda Shoppe Root Beer Float pudding snack cup. I did pick it up and look it over, but I know there is about a 5% chance of me enjoying this snack, so I put it back down.

Notice the new Butterscotch pudding carries the more traditional KS packaging. Heck, you can barely see the NEW! on the label. I would have bought these had I not seen the Jell-o cups above (in retrospect, I obviously made the wrong choice).

And now time for a short story... nah, this post is long enough. Basically I've been digging into Kozy Shack off and on for almost a decade now. Right now I'm on a rice pudding kick.

It's low fat, tasty, and satisfying. I use to prefer the weird little tapioca balls in the tapioca pudding, but in retrospect the rice pudding is where it's at. I'll have between 1 and 2 servings and call it a night. I think the picture above represents the 3rd or 4th container I've bought in the last month or so. Sure I could rock the chocolate pudding or the chocolate rice pudding varieties, but this is usually an end of day snack (8:30-9ish) so I hate to have chocolate before bed.

The only downside to getting the big containers instead of the little cups is that as the pudding sits in the fridge, they get progressively more watery. The first day it's real firm, the second is similar, but after that it really starts souping up. By the end of the final serving, we could be doing the final slurping instead of the final scooping. This fact doesn't usually bother me, but I actually wound up tossing the last 1/2 cup of pudding on the last container.

Ok, this post was going to end, but then I went to Wegman's.

That's right, Snack Pack brand has also got in on the fall pudding action. This really is a back to school epidemic with their new Bakery Shop line. They've got chocolate cupcake, frosted sugar cookie, lemon meringue pie, and apple pie a la mode. I've never been a huge fan of non-refrigerated pudding snacks, but I think we'll make an exception. Hey, if it's terrible, I'm only out a dollar.

I'm not 100% sure why, but I picked the apple pie a la mode as the guinea pig. Chocolate seemed to easy, cookie might be too sweet, and I'm not a huge lemon fan, so apple might have some whacky chance of being good (at least after spending a night in the fridge).

Well, it's.... something... it definitely has an apple taste... and some cinnamon... and well I don't know if I get a pie vibe, but it's something alright. Let me put it this way, I won't be repurchasing these, but they aren't terrible either.

Hey? Are you still there? You just looked at all the pictures didn't ya? Ahhh, that's ok, I kind of expected that. I think everyone gets the idea that there are a ton of new snacks out for the start of school. Enjoy the long weekend everyone and good luck to your kids on their new school year.