Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup

If you follow this blog at all, you know that I passionately adore chunky ice creams. That is one of my favorite things about Ben & Jerry's ice cream in particular - that they have incorporated so many fun textures and chunky pieces into their signature flavors, making them more unique than other ice cream brands in my estimation. But I have to admit that sometimes very chunky ice creams have a major downfall - if a particular flavor of ice cream is too hard packed and/or the chunks are too large, it can be extremely difficult to dig up a spoonful, and even more frustrating to enjoy an entire serving.

This was the challenge that I encountered when I first opened a pint of Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup, and it felt as though the delicious Peanut Butter ice cream and chunks of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were taunting me. (Although technically, I don't think they are actually Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, but they are exactly the same.) The Peanut Butter ice cream was dense and hard packed that I could hardly dig my spoon into the pint, and the Peanut Butter Cups were so large that when I encountered one I had to entirely give up on scooping it out. After all, the peanut butter cups are pretty much whole and intact, the same size as Reese's mini Peanut Butter Cups. Those Reese's minis may seem small when you are just grabbing one or two for a snack, but one of those is definitely a tiny, manageable chunk to encounter in your pint of ice cream. I was determined to come up with a solution, though. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are one of my favorite treats, aside from ice cream, and plus one of my friends had recommended this particular flavor to me as being one of her favorites. Clearly if I could figure out how to scoop this flavor more easily, it would be worth my time and effort.

This is how I discovered the secret to eating extremely chunky ice cream. The proper way to go about enjoying this type of dance, hard packed ice cream with huge, even unmanageable chunks, is quite simple. Take the pint out of the freezer and leave it on the counter for five to ten minutes before you start to eat it. The ice cream becomes softer and more malleable, but its still cold and enjoyable.

Once I let my pint of Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup soften a bit, it was every bit as delicious as my friend had said. The concept for this flavor is not very complicated - Reese's Peanut Butter Cups buried in Peanut Butter ice cream. Simple, yes. But amazing all the same.

The one downside to this flavor is that because of the huge pieces of Reese's peanut butter cups, the calories per serving for this flavor is particularly high, at 340 calories for a half a cup. (That is in comparison to 270 to 300 calories per serving for many Ben & Jerry's flavors.) But the nice thing with this flavor is that because of the huge chunks, you can really take your time to enjoy a single serving. Because huge chunks in my ice cream tend to slow me down, I ended up being able to control a lot better how much of this flavor I ate at once, and enjoyed about a half a serving at a time without feeling like I had to have more. With some Ben & Jerry's flavors, I want to keep eating and eating. I can demolish a half of a pint or more without too much thought. But with this flavor, the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are very rich. Even when I am eating them by themselves, I can usually enjoy just one or two mini cups at a time. So having four or five Reese's minis surrounded by delicious cold ice cream is plenty of a treat for me, and tallies up to about 200 calories.

Since I love Reese's Peanut Butter Cups so much, I am willing to forgive the higher caloric content of this flavor and I give it 5 stars. Definitely not an everyday treat, but that almost makes it even better. When I do pull out a pint of Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup, it is a true treat.