When it comes to the holidays I'm old school, which in my book means that Christmas season doesn't start until Black Friday after Thanksgiving. But Blue Bell must think otherwise, because passing by my local Walmart freezer today I noticed their "Christmas Cookies" flavor staring back at me. Being a lover of Christmas and cookies, I just had to try this!
Blue Bell describes "Christmas Cookies", part of their Holiday Favorites lineup, as a sugar cookie flavored ice cream with chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, and sugar cookies with red candy cane shaped sprinkles and a green icing swirl. Peeling back the lid, I noticed the presence of just about all of these elements, especially the green icing swirl and the red candy sprinkles. Digging in, my spoon quickly encountered resistance as it collided with unknown cookie pieces and the feast was on!
A half-hour and an empty container later, I concluded that Christmas Cookies is a wonderful ice cream. The base itself is both a bit creamier than Blue Bell's vanilla and sweeter too, much like a good sugar cookie. The green icing is not a mint flavor, but more like a rich and creamy birthday cake icing, similar to the kind my mom would squeeze out of a tube onto her cookies, while the red candy sprinkles combine with the green icing to provide a cheerful Christmas-like aesthetic. Best of all, the three mix-ins are each delicious and are generously distributed throughout the container. I would say the snickerdoodle and sugar cookie mixes are more plentiful than the chocolate chip, but all three are in abundance, and we are not talking little pieces but rather nice size chunks of each! Also, this ice cream has great synergy. As good as the ingredients sound separately, they gel together even better. Once the ice cream starts to melt a little, the creamy base, swirling icing, and cookie chunks melt into one bodacious mass of ice cream flavor, and because you get three different types of cookies, different combinations of these chunks produce different flavors, so the taste-buds are continuously stimulated in different but always delicious ways.
I'm grateful that Blue Bell thinks the Christmas season starts in late October, because that means we get this great flavor now rather than later. I advise all ice cream lovers to get this while it lasts!
Where Steve Found It: Walmart
Steve's Grade: A
And here's my review of the exact same flavor they release in the Summer, which they call Christmas Cookies in July:
