One of my all time favorite creamy sweet treats growing up was a frozen yogurt from TCBY called White Chocolate Mousse.  It was succulent and smooth in a way that vanilla could never be, and sadly, I haven’t had that perfectly swirled soft serve in years, but have always looked for a worthy replacement.  Additionally, one of my favorite cookies has always been white chocolate macadamia nut, and my love for the cookie and ice cream have very rarely come together.  Once again, Little G has come to my rescue.  Combining forces with MdoughW, the two have released a pint that combines white chocolate ice cream with roasted macadamia nuts, and MdoughW’s sugar cookie doughies.

The white chocolate base is fantastic.  Insanely smooth and creamy, it is decently sweet with a distinct white chocolate finish that’s really hard to describe.  There are no vanilla notes, especially compared to Little G’s vanilla bean, and it is less sweet than a typical sweet cream, with less of a pronounced dairy flavor.  White chocolate is such a difficult taste to pinpoint, but it can generally be distinguished and attributed to the use of cocoa butter, which gives an added layer of richness that just simply works in ice cream and makes it even creamier than your typical super premium base.

The MdoughW sugar cookie doughies are delicious and taste almost exactly like a more authentic less grainy version of when I eat Pillsbury’s sugar cookie dough before baking them (shhh don’t tell anyone).  They are soft and buttery with a lovely saltiness and don’t really taste like they’ve been cooked at all – and I love it.  The salty flavor really shines through against the perfectly sweetened and creamy base and if this were a sugar cookie dough ice cream this is all that I would need to be immensely satisfied.

Where this pint suffers is in the execution of the buttery and always unique tasting macadamia nuts.  While they’ve been roasted, they haven’t been salted or seasoned in any way and fall kind of flat, even when submerged in the sugary abyss of white chocolate.  They are also too big.  I appreciate the idea that they should be large enough to give a bold flavor, and they do add a legit crunch, but including whole nuts makes them incredibly hard and almost astringent, at times sucking the life out of my spoon.  Had the macadamia nuts been smaller and/or candied, or even just dusted with some decent salt they could have really helped elevate the flavor to its true cookie ice cream potential.

I love the base and the sugar cookies in this one a LOT, but the treatment of the nuts and the amount of them really pull away from how awesome this pint could have been.  I would love to see Grace use the white chocolate again in a flavor that doesn’t get weighed down by a hard, mouth-drying component like the macadamia’s, or maybe even just try this one again using half the amount of nuts and throwing in a couple white chips for good measure, because through and through I still really enjoyed eating this.

Rating: 8.5/10
Found at: http://www.goldbely.com (use code seanpancake0 for $25 off of your first order!)