The Marble Cake Of The Ice Cream World (Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Caramel Fudge)

Member Name: zoe_page_1

Product:	Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Caramel Fudge
Date:	16/04/02 (165 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: delicious, easy to eat

Disadvantages: siding a little on the expensive side

I celebrated my self control at having eaten only 2 ice creams while on holiday in a hot foreign country by, erm, coming back to Manchester and scoffing a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. Ok, that’s a lie. First off, ladies don’t “scoff”, we eat delicately. Secondly, I didn’t have the whole tub. Not that I didn’t want to, you understand, but because the other half got there first. Still, I got maybe a third of a tub, which is quite enough to fill my tummy and fuel me with stuff to write about.

“Vanilla Caramel Fudge” isn’t the type of flavour your normally get from B+J’s. To start with, there aren’t any chunky bits in – no fruit, no cookie, no unidentifiable chewy blobs. It’s smooth, all the way. As the name more or less suggests, this is vanilla ice cream with caramel and chocolate fudge swirled in. It tastes soooo nice. There’s none of that icky artificialness you get with, say, caramel ice cream, and none of the boredom certain boyfriends associate with pure vanilla.

The ice cream itself looks creamy. I’m not sure how it can, but believe me, it does. The caramel is a rich caramely caramel colour and the chocolate fudge, you’ve guessed it, a chocolately fudgy colour. As you peel back the plastic lid, you get a glimpse of what’s to come, and after digging in your teaspoon (fine, ladle, happy now Quy?) you’re directly confronted with it: the ice cream looks just like marble cake. The caramel and fudge are dispersed equally, but unevenly throughout. Does that make sense? What I mean is, each “layer” has differing amounts of each, but both sauces are spread throughout the pot, and don’t linger at the bottom, forcing you to eat 400ml just to get to the 100ml you wanted all along.


** The Extra Facts You Just Won’t Be Able To Sleep Easy Without Knowing **

It’s soft-ish scoop, meaning tha
t you can usually spoon it out of the tub straight from the freezer. Handy when you just can’t, or won’t wait. If it’s frozen solid, our good friend Jerry recommends popping it in the microwave. This I do not recommend, for the following reason. When it goes slushy it looks like baby sick. Thin, runny and pale-ish, there’s no better comparison than to infant puke . So in the interests of improving the NHS by not visiting your GP due to you yourself having thrown up repeatedly, you have to eat is a quickly as possible after removing it from the freezer. It’s your duty to do this, and I’ll be most disappointed if you don’t.

It comes in 100ml and 500ml pots, I think, and can be bought from supermarkets, little corner shops and video rental places among others. We paid £3.89 at a local off late shop, significantly, ok 10p, less than at Blockbuster. Tesco often have it on 2-for-1 which is jolly generous of them. They also have it at the B+J’s counter at UCI cinemas, starting at £1.50 for one scoop. Can you say, “rip off”?

** Nutrition **

After a thorough investigation (ok, fine, a trip to their website www.benjerry.co.uk) I am happy to inform you that, nutritionally, this one isn’t all that bad. For a start, a standard serving has 4g protein, and 10% of your RDA of calcium. I mean sure, it’s 14% fat, but what’s a little fat here and there? It offers you 65mg of Cholesterol which I think is rather charitable of it, although being British, young and not all that interested, this number means very little to me. It’s widely reported that the “best” products have the fewest ingredients, but this must, quite frankly, be piffle if this ice cream is anything to go by – it has more than 30 but still tastes mighty fine to me, and is not only suitable for vegetarians, but also Kosher too.


** Verdict **

This is one of my favourite fl
avours, and certainly one worth the extra 20 minutes on the treadmill which come with having consumed a large blob or two of this. It’s very sweet which for me is a good thing, as I cannot eat too much in one go, and it’s always perfect – just the right amount of caramel and chocolate swirled in, in just the right places. It’s great for slurping (ladies may not scoff, but we have been known to slurp on occasion) as it’s all fluid and doesn’t require chewing in any way, shape or form. Perfect for Sunday mornings in bed, when you’re not wide awake enough to eat but, y’know, *need* ice cream :-)

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