What is it?

Blue Bell’s Strawberry Lemonade Ice Cream continues the company’s tradition of generally straightforward and boring names, but it does have a couple of twists. First, it’s a mix of ice cream (strawberry) and sherbet (lemonade), and then it adds in lemon-flavored flakes.

How is it?

It’s quite tasty but also a classic example that more is not always better. And yes, I’m talking about you, lemon-flavored flakes. But let me get back to them.

The strawberry ice cream is creamy with a more subdued flavor than what you might get from other brands. It’s clearly strawberry, but it just doesn’t jump up and down and scream strawberry. The lemonade flavor is, well, basically lemon (is there really any difference between lemonade and lemon flavoring?). Together, they are a perfectly refreshing summer treat.

The surprising part for me was that the ice cream and sherbet were almost indistinguishable from each other, except for the different flavors, of course. Even eating the sherbet by itself, I had difficulty convincing myself it was sherbet, as it seemed almost as creamy as the strawberry. So if you are looking for two contrasting textures, you will likely be disappointed. But as for their flavor, they were great together.

Now let’s get back to the lemon flakes. On the plus side, they kind of look like shark teeth, so the 5-year-old in me thought that was cool. But other than that, all they did was add a weird and tasteless crunch, like when you eat ice cream of an unknown age from the back of the freezer and it has those big ice chunks in it. If you enjoy those ice chunks, you might like these flakes. But this would have been better off without them, even if they were only a minor annoyance.

Anything else you need to know?

As I wrote this review, I really gave spell check a workout as I could not stop typing “sherbert.” I know that’s not how you spell it, but my fingers kept adding that second r. It turns out that my fingers are smarter than my brain. This might blow your mind a little too, but “sherbert” is actually correct, sort of. According to Merriam-Webster, sherbert “isn’t wrong” and is “now a fully established (though far lesser-used) variant.” So I say we all make a pact to only use sherbert until it becomes the more common variant, or at least until spell check accepts it.

Conclusion:

Even though the lemon flakes knocked my rating down a little for this one, it’s still a classic and delicious flavor combination. I’m looking forward to making a float with this by adding lemon-lime or strawberry soda like the Blue Bell website suggests.

Purchased Price: $6.98
Size: 1/2 Gallon
Purchased at: H-E-B
Rating: 7 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (2/3 cup) 200 calories, 7 grams of fat, 4.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 20 milligrams of cholesterol, 60 milligrams of sodium, 32 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of dietary fiber, 27 grams of sugar, and 3 grams of protein.

What is Blue Bell Chocolate Peanut Butter Overload Ice Cream?

This new flavor from Blue Bell features milk chocolate ice cream with chocolate-coated peanut butter cups and peanut butter cookie dough pieces. But is it really overloaded? I can’t tell you yet, or you might stop reading.

How is it?

It’s awesome, assuming that you like chocolate and peanut butter. The milk chocolate base is creamy and silky, and it’s the perfect complement to its two friends from the peanut butter family, cups and cookie dough pieces. The PB cups are perhaps not quite as peanut buttery as the familiar Reese’s variety, but they are still tasty and deliver a nice firm crunch when you bite down. The cookie dough pieces are quite firm as well, and they contribute a wonderful peanut butter flavor and that almost granular texture of raw dough. The mixture of these three components is certainly not ground-breaking, but it sure is good.

Anything else you need to know?

After the satisfying feeling of peeling the top off this and seeing what looked like a sparsely inhabited chocolate terrain, I was skeptical about the “overload” part of its name. But after further excavation, there were plenty of PB cups and PB cookie dough pieces (which are a little hard to see because of their color). So I can confirm that this is deserving of the overload moniker. Let me explain why I can do so with such confidence.

I visit my local frozen yogurt shop quite often. I go enough that I have developed a classification system for my fellow froyo enthusiasts. There’s The Sampler, who must try every flavor…even vanilla, because what could that possibly taste like? Then there’s The Undecided, who barely makes it to the register before their froyo turns to soup because they spent too long agonizing over whether to put Kit Kat or Twix on it. Then there’s my category, The Overloader. I put a modest amount of froyo in a cup (the largest one available, of course), and then at the toppings station, I somehow forget how basic math works and I’m stunned that my pay-per-ounce total comes to something like $16.32. Maybe nine scoops of PB cups were too much, so I know what overloaded is, and this is about as close as you can get from a store-bought product.

Conclusion:

I’m not very good at Tetris, but I’m getting ready to play the freezer version of it to see how much space I can free up so that I can stock up on this limited time ice cream. If you like chocolate and peanut butter, you need to try this.

Purchased Price: $6.98
Size: 1/2 Gallon
Purchased at: H-E-B
Rating: 9 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (2/3 cup) 280 calories, 15 grams of fat, 8 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 30 milligrams of cholesterol, 100 milligrams of sodium, 32 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 27 grams of sugar, and 6 grams of protein.