After New Orleans Ice Cream Company's Lemon Doberge Cake overcame what I previously thought possible from a flavor featuring lemon ice cream, I decided to take on Lemon Cookie as my next selection from Three Twins. While the flavor from our friends in Louisiana revolved around cake, this offering from Three Twins incorporates vanilla sandwich creme cookies with their organic lemon ice cream. The intense sourness from the citrus fruit seems like it wouldn't be a successful basis for ice cream, but when combined with chunks of cookies, the base would have to be pretty bad to ruin the potential here.
Lifting off the green top to this pint, the light-colored ice cream doesn't attempt to hide the frequent fragments of vanilla creme cookies hiding below the surface. At 210 calories per serving, the consistency is denser than your standard selection, bordering on a super-premium. As my spoon hits the first layer, the base is free of any icy texture, an attribute that has plagued fruit-based offerings in the past. Not only is the base smooth, but it's also slow-melting, lingering on the tongue for a while before breaking down. Three Twins has combined the ideal amount of lemon with sweet ice cream to capture the citric taste without any of the tartness. The sweet filling of the sandwich cookies has effectively infiltrated the lemon base enough to give most bites a bit of a vanilla undertone.
Every bit as good as the cake used in Lemon Doberge Cake, these vanilla sandwich creme cookies are the perfect accompaniment to the base ice cream. The actual cookies don't have the typical crunchy exterior, but instead remain soft, chewy and bursting with vanilla flavoring. Its seems as if Three Twins has managed to find another complimentary mix-in to lemon ice cream, and there aren't many. The end result was a pint of organic ice cream that I enjoyed much more than I had originally thought possible.
Where I Found It: The Fresh Market
Grade: B
