Ben & Jerry's Core

On Tuesday evening I was invited to attend a sneak preview of a couple of Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavours. I don't say no to ice cream!

The Ben & Jerry's Core 500ml tubs contain a soft core of something (like a raspberry ripple sort of effect) with two flavours of ice cream around them. A few flavours were launched last year but these were new.

Woody made a fleeting visit

A masseuse was on-hand to give moo-ssages (apparently the cows have a massage machine so we were pretty much being given a taste of life as a dairy cow), a couple of nail artists were doing Ben & Jerry's themed manicures, the prosecco flowed and there were as many peanut butter and jam sandwiches and brownies as you could possibly want.

Peanut butter and jam? Yes, I'll get to that.

There was also a lot of ice cream. Lots and lots.

I started with my nails. Cow print with cow faces on the thumbs. Not my usual style at all but very cute and I had a great antipodean chat to the lovely Kiwi girl who did them.

Then on to the ice creams. The Blondie Brownie is a core of salted caramel with chocolate ice cream with chocolate brownie chunks and vanilla ice cream with blondie chunks.

The salted caramel was absolutely divine but I found the ice cream component a bit hard going. There were just too many chunks in it, which detracted from the caramel and made it all a bit too sweet (yes, the brownies are sweeter than the caramel), and not enough ice cream! Plus I am not really a fan of cookie dough or cakey sorts of inclusions in ice creams, so this one just wasn't the sort of thing I would usually order or eat. I had to have a second helping just to be sure though.

I much preferred the other flavour, Peanut Butter Me Up. An ode to the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it was a core of raspberry jam with peanut butter ice cream, and vanilla ice cream studded with mini peanut butter cups. The jam was, of course, jammy but actually not too sweet, the peanut butter flavour was fairly subtle but given a boost every time I bit into one of the little peanut butter cups. I would definitely buy this one, although to be honest I think if they combined the salted caramel core from the Blondie Brownie with the ice cream and peanut butter cups from this one, it'd be much closer to my idea of ice cream heaven. Or a peanut butter caramel core in raspberry and vanilla ice creams? Now there's an idea...

Rhodri Morgan, one of the brand managers for Ben & Jerry's UK, did a very brief spiel about these new flavours, but then I got to have a bit of a chat to him about the brand, our shared love for Nigella Lawson, the wonders of twitter and so forth. Ben & Jerry's is of course a Unilever (massive global conglomerate ptooey!) brand now, but they seem to be trying to maintain their hippy roots with progressive policies and an eye on the environment. In the UK they have moved over to entirely fairtrade ingredients, their ice creams are vegetarian friendly and they are campaigning for equal marriage legislation and to improve welfare standards for dairy cows in the E.U. All of which I like. These ice creams do, of course, have a much longer ingredients list than home made but at least I recognise all the words on the labels.

And now to work on my plan for an even better peanut butter and jam inspired ice cream...

Two days before a hair cut and colour and sadly not my glorious orange handbag