Baskin Robbins Canada BeaverTails Pastry Ice Cream

[By Jeffrey, New for June 2015, Returned July 2016]
Hello everyone, Jeffrey Scott here to give you the scoop on a new flavour of the month at participating Baskin Robbins locations in Canada. This is my first time reviewing an ice cream as I am usually a pop and chip guy, but I also love me an icy, creamy, treat once in awhile. Since Dubba's passport expired, he made a call to the bullpen for me, @JunkFoodJeff, to give it a whirl. See, I am one of the lucky people in the world to live on the Canadian/US border, in fact, the Detroit River is literally one block away from me and when it comes to "junk food", I literally have the best of both worlds at my fingertips. Today, I have the chance to try...

 Baskin-Robbins BeaverTails Pastry Ice Cream

BeaverTails pastry pieces and a fried dough flavoured ribbon

swirled within cinnamon caramel flavoured ice cream

BeaverTails are a Canadian "delicacy" consisting of fried dough shaped like a beaver's tail, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. Think funnel cake meets cinnamon donuts from the fair or cider mill.

As you can see, the BeaverTails Pastry ice cream consists of cinnamon-caramel ice cream with chunks of BeaverTails pastry, and a fried dough (!?) swirl. The description actually sounds pretty appealing to me and actually intrigued me enough to leave the house to eat ice cream. For whatever reason, I don't usually get my ice cream from ice cream parlours, but rather buy pints or tubs from the grocery store. I can't figure out if it's a price thing or a convenience thing, but I digress, I'm at 31 flavours now.

As you can see from the picture, it doesn't look much like the promo picture above, but I think that's a good thing in this case because it actually looks better in person than it does in pictures. One funny thing to mention, there aren't going to be a bunch of pictures unfortunately because the ice cream and ripple and caramel and fried dough swirl are all the same beige colour so it doesn't photograph well.

Can't really judge the smell due to the fact they were making fresh waffle cones when I was in there, but the mix of the hot waffles and this ice cream, in fact did smell like a BeaverTails truck.

The initial taste was identical to the taste of the milk you get at the bottom of a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The base is creamy, and cinnamon-y. The caramel ribbon is the basic BR caramel ripple. Sweet, buttery, burnt sugar creaminess that everyone loves. It very much compliments the ice cream. In fact, I'd eat cinnamon caramel swirl ice cream if it were a thing.

Before I move onto the actual pieces of pastry in the mix, I want to address the fried dough swirl. When I first read the description online I assumed it was just going to be a brown sugar ribbon with a bizarre name, but I was wrong. The best way to describe it is to have you imagine you just bought a dozen piping hot, crispy, sugary donuts from the fair. The next day after all twelve donuts have disappeared, the one thing left is the mix of greasy, sugary, cinnamon-y, crumbs at the bottom of the paper bag that they came in. That's what this ribbon is! No more feeling guilty about licking your finger and dipping it into those delicious fried sugary morsels, because you can confidently eat them in this ice cream.

I wish I was able to take a picture of the pastry pieces in this ice cream but like I said before the entire mix was off-white. The initial taste of the pastry isn't like a fried donut, but rather a boxed cake. Cinnamon coffee cake to be exact. The fact that fried dough was put into wet frozen mix I'm sure changed the texture but the fried ripple makes up for it. You could call this ice cream Coffee Cake ice cream and no one would be the wiser. I like the cake pieces, and they are reminiscent of when you go to a child's birthday party and they offer you the obligatory grocery-store slab cake and vanilla ice cream. When you scrape your plastic fork across your paper plate, mixing whatever cake crumbs are left with the melted ice cream. The texture is exactly that. It's a nice change from the ice cream I usually eat and reminds me of the long discontinued fan-favourite from Haagen-Dasz, Sticky Toffee Pudding, with it's caramel base and cake pieces.

Verdict?  creamy delicious base, moist cake pieces, and the crunchy fried bits make this a definite guilty pleasure. It's the perfect kind of treat that I wish I could buy at a grocery store.
Buy Again?  I'll definitely eat it again before it's gone at the end of the month.

Dubba's Note: Big thanks to Jeffrey for checking this out for all of us. Nick reminded me that I had wanted to try the U.S. version which was aptly named "State Fair Fried Dough" last year and now I'm kicking myself that I didn't (this flavor also bares some resemblance to the recent "Golden Oreo 'n Churro flavor" that I also missed). My disappointment aside, this seemed like a great time to try a Canadian review on everyone and see what you think. Should we do more of these? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.