Trader Joe's Speculoos Cookie Butter Ice Cream

What hath Trader Joe's wrought?

Cookie butter ice cream...is a thing. I repeat: there exists at Trader Joe's a product which is both speculoos cookie butter...and ice cream.

Now I can die a happy man. A morbidly obese, yet happy man. It has a vanilla-esque base and it's full of speculoos cookie flavor. There are big globs of actual cookie butter throughout it. I couldn't figure out if it was the smooth variety or the crunchy. It strikes me as being somewhere in between the two, perhaps, but no...it's actually probably original. It's just firmer than usual because it's cold. Does it really matter? They make cookie butter ice cream. I repeat: the product in these pictures is real...and it's speculoos cookie butter flavored ice cream.

What's next in TJ's diabolical plan? Cookie and Cocoa Swirl Ice Cream? Slap the words "cookie butter" on a Trader Joe's product, and you pretty much have a big winner every time...with maybe one exception so far. I started shaking when I heard the news. Sonia and I started calling all the TJ's in our region to see who had it in stock. As I mentioned in my last post, Sonia and I just moved. And thanks to the customer service wizards at Comcast, we were without internet for a few days. A big thanks to Russ for holding down the fort during our transition. We're still buried beneath boxes and swamped with address changes, phone calls to realtors, and new utility accounts, but the magic of the interwebs floweth once more to bring you good tidings of great cookie butter.

This ice cream is on par with the discontinued classic Lemon Triple Gingersnap Ice Cream—and maybe even exceeds it in some ways. It's a legend, in every way fit for the halls of the Pantheon. It really actually honestly seriously tastes just like the original cookie butter, and it blends perfectly with the sweet ice cream surrounding it. Sonia says it could use just a bit more in that gingersnappy, cinnamony department. And I agree, it does err on the side of sweet, rather than spicy, but I think it works. I think the flavor is perfect. If a madman held a gun to my head and forced me to make a complaint about this product, I'd simply ask for larger globs of cookie butter in the mix. But until that hypothetical lunatic starts waving his Glock in my direction, I'm sticking with my story that this is a near-perfect product that just needed to be here on Earth right now...even in light of its $5 price tag. From the bottom of my heart, Trader Joe, thank you for making Cookie Butter Ice Cream. I give it a perfect 5. Sonia gives it four and a half.

Bottom line: 9.5 out of 10.