Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Caramel Fudge

I have to admit that when I first saw the pint of Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Caramel Fudge, I wasn't very excited. Sure I love caramel, and sure I love fudge, but a lot of Ben & Jerry's flavors have caramel and fudge - and then some. And vanilla ice cream? Yawn. Nine times out of ten, give me chocolate ice cream, peanut butter ice cream, sweet cream ice cream... any ice cream but vanilla ice cream. Vanilla Caramel Fudge seemed too simple, like a cop out from the Ben & Jerry's Flavor Gurus. "They're just phoning it in," I thought.

But then I had a flash of memory.  Images recollected from high school of happy visits to the local Baskin Robbins with groups of my friends.  We would walk down the block from the school after play rehearsal or over to the shop on boring Sunday afternoons.  I remember staring down into the bucket of the flavor called "Gold Medal Ribbon" with anticipation as the employee scooped my order, a flavor aptly named because it had decent-sized ribbons of chocolate and caramel running through the vanilla ice cream.  Gold Medal Ribbon was my favorite flavor of ice cream for several years when I was growing up in Michigan, a time when I didn't have a job and it seemed like I was always pulling the very last few dollars from my wallet and scrounging for some coins at the bottom of my purse to pay for my scoop. Good times. (Someone over at Baskin Robbins R&D obviously did a bang up job developing and naming that flavor, since it has stuck with me for nearly fifteen years.)

Now, as a thirty-one year-old (or am I thirty-two now??) with credit cards and a paycheck to support my ice cream consumption, I found myself standing in a grocery store in New York and holding a pint of Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Caramel Fudge that sounds like the exact same flavor that I loved as a teenager. With my husband trying to move me along out of the dangerous freezer section, I gave in to nostalgia, throwing the Vanilla Caramel Fudge into my shopping cart instead of the more exciting-sounding New York Super Fudge Chunk. I wanted to see how the Ben & Jerry's flavor compared to my rose-colored memory of Gold Medal Ribbon.

And oh sweet Moses, I will never be preemptively dismissive of a simple flavor combination again, because Vanilla Caramel Fudge is a mouth orgasm that I never want to forget.  The vanilla ice cream turns out to actually be the ideal base for the generous veins of ooey gooey caramel and fudge that wind their way through the pint.  And by generous, I mean ubiquitous.  Sometimes the photos of their flavors that Ben & Jerry's posts on their website are much more chunky or filled with thicker ribbons or swirls than you actually get when you by a pint off the shelf of the average grocery store down the street.  But this photo (left) is not an exaggeration in the slightest.  As you can see from this photo that I snapped, there really are that many thick, delicious veins of caramel and fudge running through the pint -

Best of all, the caramel manages to remain soft in the freezer, as do the ribbons of fudge, which resemble chocolate sauce. In short, eating from a pint of Vanilla Caramel Fudge is like going to a scoop shop and having a sundae doused liberally with caramel and fudge sauce, only better because the veins running through the whole pint ensure that you don't eat up all the chocolate sauce and find yourself with a lump of plain vanilla ice cream still melting in your bowl. Having the fudge and caramel mixed directly in and throughout the ice cream ensures the perfect rich balance of all the flavors.  The combination reminds me of Ben & Jerry's Phish Food flavor, but I actually even prefer Vanilla Caramel Fudge because the vanilla ice cream keeps the flavor from becoming too rich and lets the caramel take the stage more equally with the chocolate fudge flavor.

Because of this perfect harmony between the two, as well as my general love of chocolate and caramel combinations, I give this flavor 5 stars and a permanent spot in my freezer.