Del Sur Bakery in Chicago, IL

Choose wisely -or- buy one of each.

My various feeds inform me that this new-ish Filipino bakery has gone "viral" and has long lines full of "influencers" filming themselves with different pastries. (I don't know if they, like, dance with the pastries or what exactly...) Here at Ice Cream U Scream we love words most, so here is my long-winded ranking of the different things my wife and I tried at Del Sur, from absolute favorite to good-but-not-my-favorite:

1. Housemade Chai with Ube Syrup - There is no shortage of items with complexity to their flavor at Del Sur, but the best example may be their chai. Their website notes that the chai contains "clove, ginger, black pepper, cayenne, star anise, cardamom, rose water, and orange." I'm sure it would have been a rollercoaster of flavor all by itself, but I had to add some of their housemade ube syrup for my iced chai latte. The beverage may be cold, but hot dang! I have had numerous ube beverages; this one was the truth.
2. Pandan Basque Cake - Buttery, dense cake that surely has some toasted rice flour mixed in, topped with pandan namelaka (think thick, yet light) cream and seasonal jam, which was guava. Guava and pandan? Holy moly, I may have a new favorite flavor combo!
3. Pumpkin Seed Croissant - Nutty and slightly earthly. This pastry is delightful, laugh-inducing pumpkin seed frangipane in a croissant topped with toasted pumpkin seeds. I don't usually consume pumpkin seeds en masse and, if you never have, eating a concentrated amount is, in a word, a thrill.

4. 

   Most of the spread.
   

   Calamansi Chamomile Bun - Just a big ol' punch of citrusy sunshine. The calamansi curd has a lightness to it that made me wonder if it was cut with a custard base. If so, the website makes no mention of it. And, my oh my, that dough with granulated sugar. (While it is chamomile sugar, the citrus kind of overpowers it.)
5. Bibingka (with guava and cream cheese filling) - The only item they were selling that isn't featured on their website, the bibingka was like an upside down muffin. This was the best way to serve it because the fillings sunk to the bottom while baking, so eating it upside down was clutch. More toasted rice flavor, more yum.
6. Adobo Brownie - My wife's first words after taking a bite were, "This is a very grown-up brownie." Not too sweet and with a host of subtle flavors. I'm just not sure that chocolate was the best vehicle for the multitude of flavors. Still good, though.
7. Toasted Rice Croissant - I mistakenly was expecting some sort of filling, something between buko and sticky rice. It was an unfilled croissant that partially used toasted rice flour. If someone gobbled it up without savoring they may mistake it for a normal, artisan croissant...not that there's anything wrong with a normal artisan croissant. But why get this when the pumpkin seed croissant uses the same dough?

Somewhat nondescript storefront
with line out the door.

8. Oatmeal Cream Pie - Cream pies have never been my favorite because it is a LOT of buttercream and cookies aren't exactly known for cutting through the richness. I had hoped for a bigger splash of ube flavor than the buttercream had.

Also available was a sesame seed covered hand pie (next time), a savory pastry with longanisa sausage, and a sweet pastry featuring banana. Needless to say, I did not purchase the pastry with the curséd fruit.

Proper Pie Co. in Richmond, VA

Buttermilk raspberry.

New Zealand-style hand pies are a thing. I had no idea that they were until my brother introduced me to Proper Pie Co. several years ago. As a lover of pie both savory and sweet, of course this was a slam dunk for me. Now every time I visit Richmond we make a stop at Proper Pie, grabbing some hand pies for lunch and choosing from an even wider selection of dessert pie slices for dessert. You can't lose at Proper Pie, but here are my favorites: 

Buttermilk Raspberry - The buttermilk doesn't need anything added to it, but I love raspberry, so no harm done. For the uninitiated, a buttermilk pie is texturally somewhere between a chess pie and a custard pie: solid, but soft. It's super rich, so something tart cutting through works the magic.

Chocolate Raspberry Cream - Chocolate and raspberry are typically two separate, complementary flavors, but in this pie it is a single flavor. The union is, in a word, sublime. The cream pie is topped with a white whipped cream with sifted cocoa powder and a few raspberries giving it a straight-out-of-Great-British-Bake-Off look to it. It goes without saying that this pie would earn a handshake from me. 

Honorable mentions: Peaches & Cream and Sweet Potato Pecan...but let's be honest and say it's all good.

Furniture City Creamery in Grand Rapids, MI

Since the pandemic, I have thrice made the journey from Chicago to Grand Rapids for ArtPrize. An annual autumnal visual arts competition featuring entries from around the world, ArtPrize is an impressive spectacle to behold. It takes over central Grand Rapids with competing art displayed in galleries, hotel lobbies, restaurants, bars, vintage stores, knick-knack shops, museums, parks, and more. They print maps of all of the participating venues so people can choose which part of town to stroll around hunting for art.

ArtPrize is one of my favorite things.

Happily, these trips also allow my wife and I to visit with our friend Annelise who lives close to downtown Grand Rapids in the East Hills neighborhood. As luck would have it, this is the same neighborhood as Furniture City Creamery. (To an outsider, it may seem like an odd name for a scoop shop, but pre-Depression-era Grand Rapids was the center of the furniture industry.)

Furniture City Creamery has a solid mix of classic flavors and inventive flavors. Here are three of the most memorable ice creams I've had there:

• Treasure Bar - Sweet cream base with toasted coconut, chocolate, butterscotch, and graham cracker. Pure bliss.
• D'ough - In their take on cookie dough ice cream, the ice cream doesn't merely contain cookie dough...it tastes like cookie dough! The flavor is a collaboration with a local bakery.
• Hot Honey Cornbread - A spicy after burn accompanies this ice cream rippled with corn bread. It is good, I'm glad I tried it, and it is also not my thing. The spicy desserts I gravitate toward are usual Mexican chocolate.

At this creamery, one is bound to find something to tantalize the tastebuds. Grab a scoop while roaming East Hills during ArtPrize!

Here are some of my favorite ArtPrize entries over the years.

2021. Ted Lott, Nomadic Domiciles

2022. Deanna Taylor, Nature's Beauty

2021. Artist and title unknown. My apologies.

2024. Edgar Hernandez, Neon Oasis

Chill in Akron, OH

It is pretty rare to order five flavors of genuinely unique ice cream concoctions. My dad and I did just that at Chill in Akron, Ohio. Located right across the street from Lock 3 ("Akron's Central Park"), Chill is a no-frills spot with at least one option of where to walk and enjoy your scoop. Or grab a cone before an Akron RubberDucks game at nearby Canal Park. Really, if you DEVOte any time to Akron, be sure to hit Chill. Who knows? Maybe you'll run into the Black Keys!

Onto the ice cream...

My dad got Grandma J's Peanut Butter Rice Krispies and Lavender Queen Bee. I got Buttered Popcorn, Dr. Pepper Float (Dr. Pepper sorbet swirled with vanilla ice cream), and Call Me Any Lime (Honey and lime ice cream with a red raspberry swirl), a somewhat sickly colored flavor that was sublime. I wish Chill were closer because all five flavors we tried were delicious. In fact, each of the flavors would be worth getting again were there not so many tempting options to choose from. There were 30+ flavors, including:

• Peach, Please! (peach cheesecake)
• Hazelnut Latte
• Blackberry Crisp
• Sweet and Salty (dark chocolate with pretzels)
• The 9AM French Toast and Bacon (french toast ice cream with maple and bacon)
• Tiger Tail (orange ice cream and black licorice ice cream)
• El Nino Jalapeno (jalapeno corn bread)
• Extra Spicy Mango (mango ice cream steeped with habanero)

Chill also has two locations in nearby Medina. Check 'em out!

Classic Frozen Custard in Des Moines, IA

My only pair of shoes are wet, my umbrella is only mildly helping, and we've arrived in Des Moines much later than I had hoped after a 350 mile drive from Chicago. There isn't anywhere else I'd rather be than studying the menu at a clearly storied frozen custard stand. The spot is Classic Frozen Custard. I'm curious what this place looks like in the daytime, because it ain't much to look at at night. Luckily the menu is looking real nice.

Most frozen custard spots only have three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and a flavor of the day. Here at Classic Frozen Custard, their worn out signage shows nine(!) flavors and all of them sound tasty. I observe that this place is, as their name suggests, a classic custard joint with the huge machine behind the counter, not one of these new, fangled places serving up fancily named soft serve. So how does one explain the veritable cornucopia of options here? Either they don't make it fresh every day--no biggie--or they do good enough business that they are constantly in production. Given that the stand is both run-down and busy, it could go either way. That said, it's after 9:30pm on a Wednesday in Iowa and there has been a constant stream of cars in the drive-thru, plus a few chilly customers like me at the walk-up window.

After much chin stroking, I settle on a tree nut sampler: butter pecan, caramel cashew, and coconut. After they bring me more than a pint of freshly scooped frozen custard, a take it back to the car to enjoy. My lactose intolerant wife-to-be agrees that this place looks LEGIT, takes a Lactaid, and digs in to the butter pecan. She and I are both taken aback by how good it is. The caramel cashew is even better, but only by a hair. And the coconut (also euphoric) is chock full of toasted coconut bits.

This place is real good, y'all. Their menu is more than just scoops of custard, too; they offer twisters, sundaes, malts, shakes, and root beer floats, so there's something for everyone. If you're headed to Caitlin Clark's birthplace, stop at Classic Frozen Custard. "Once you lick it, you'll luv it!"

Macaron Bar (multiple Midwest locations)

I didn't truly understand macarons until I went to Paris in 2018. The place that did the trick for me was Pierre Hermé, which I've already blogged about. Since a new spot has opened up here in Andersonville-- Macaron Bar--I decided to give it a try. I walked through the doors and quickly realized that narrowing down to a few options would be a trial. I committed to a 12-pack, being sure to buy two with the same flavors so my sweetie and I could do a taste test.

Overall, the flavor varieties were mostly classic with an imaginative flare, the sweetness level was subtle and never cloying, and the texture was right--soft and slightly chewy, but with that fragile shell.

Here is my ranking of the flavors I tried, which is very close to my sweetie's ranking.

The best:

(1) Pistachio

(2) Snickerdoodle

(3) Black Raspberry Chocolate

(4) Earl Grey Tea

(5) Dark Chocolate

(6) Coconut

The rest:

(7) Hazelnut

(8) Salted Caramel

(9) Red Velvet

(10) Chicago Mix

(11) Lemon Lavender

(12) Strawberry Chocolate

Macaron Bar is a small chain, mostly located in the Midwest. Locations are on their website. Worth the try!

Marco-brand grocery store pints

The tagline of Marco brand ice cream is "Culinary flavors. Global traditions." And with their roster of favors, they certainly live up to it: Turkish Mocha, Aztec Chocolate, Green Tea & White Chocolate, Moroccan Honey Nut, Dulce de Leche & Cookies, Vanilla Chai...and, uh, Peanut Butter Caramel. I bought five of the flavors to sample and review. Here they are listed from favorite to least favorite:

Dulce de Leche & Cookies - Most would-be dulce de leche ice creams merely taste like a sickly sweet caramel. This one tastes like the real thing. And no matter how much I ate in one sitting, it never was cloying. The churro-inspired cookie mix-in is okay, but honestly, even though it isn't dominant, this would have been better without it. The ice cream base is just that good.

Vanilla Chai - I will never turn away a cardamom ice cream and this one is no exception. That said, rare as they are, I've had other chai ice creams that pack more of a punch. Still, to see a good-not-amazing chai ice cream in the grocery store as a win.

Peanut Butter Caramel - The caramel in this is runny and excellent. The peanut butter base isn't stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth, which is a good thing. All in all a decent flavor; it's just peanut butter forward isn't my usual area of interest in desserts.

Aztec Chocolate - Chocolate ice cream rarely tastes like its namesake and is often disappointing because of it. This ice cream continues the long line of disappointing chocolate ice creams. Sure, the spice is there and it certainly is a dark brown (almost black) color, but chocolate it ain't.

Moroccan Honey Nut - This is one of the most interesting and original ice cream flavors I've eaten. Walking the border of savory and sweet, it makes use of a ras el hanout spice mixture. Try as I might, I could not tell you what all of the flavor notes here were. If it were just a hint more creamy and sweet, maybe I would have liked it.

Dr. Bombay's grocery store pints

The five flavors available at the Jewels.

With a leopard-print lid and a different multi-colored pinwheel art for each flavor, Dr. Bombay's ice cream pints stick out on the grocery store aisle. Apparently, this ice cream is a product of Snoop Dogg's imagination. I decided to buy one of each in the line to pass on the knowledge of what's worth trying and what you can skip. From best to worst:

S'more Vibes - Both sweet and creamy, this is easily the best of their ice cream bases. Wisely, they used dark chocolate fudge bites rather than mimicking a waxy, milk "chocolate" Hershey bar. Tasty graham swirl. I've no idea why they included crisped rice, but it isn't a bad addition.

Tropical Sherbet Swizzle - This is delicious. Tarter than your average sherbet and the pineapple swirl elevates this even further. Lost the top spot to S'more Vibes only by a hair.

Syrupy Waffle Sundaze - The ice cream base, which the packaging calls "waffle ice cream," is somewhere between brown sugar and maple. The waffle pieces are somewhere between a crisp Eggo and a waffle cone. A unique flavor.

Bonus Track Brownie - Not much flavor in the vanilla ice cream base. The "thick fudge swirl" is like what they use in Moose Tracks, like almost exactly. This flavor is pretty middle of the road.

Rollin' in the Dough - Not a good ice cream base. According to the packaging, it is "cookie ice cream." Tastes chemically, which is a shame since everything mixed in tastes good.

Churn in Phoenix, AZ

Some places do the classics so well, they don’t need to do anything else. Churn is one of them. And they know it. Just check out this humble selection:

You can’t lose, but here are my thoughts on what’s best: 

Strawberry: Quite simply, this is the best strawberry I’ve ever had that wasn’t made by my own hand. This is the MUST TRY. 

Butter Pecan: Many capture the butter, but this one also captures the pecan as a flavor, not just a mix-in. Quite possibly the best butter pecan I've ever had.

Honorable mention: Double Chocolate and Malted Milk Chocolate, which are distinctly different and both more chocolate-y than your average brown ice cream claiming to be chocolate.

This Phoenix scoop shop fantastic. I wish I had the words to sell it better. I dunno...This has not been my best post, but after over 15 years I have spots I wish I'd blogged about and didn't. This is the one I think of the most.

For the Instagram set, I'm also a fan of Churn's decor, which like the menu is simple but elevated.

Freezer Favs: Stewarts's Crumbs Along the Mohawk

While this blog is primarily a fan of local scoop shops, it acknowledges that sometimes a person just wants to stay in for the night. That being said, this is one of my Freezer Favorites.

• • •

Full disclosure: I have not eaten this flavor since the summer of 2005, the same summer I met and discussed ice cream with Marisa Tomei...and over two years before this blog was created. The seeds of this blog were actually a series of MySpace blog posts that summer all those years ago. While at a summer internship, I had chosen to detail my notable summer experiences in the Berkshires through the lens of the notable desserts I ate. It seems that even back then, my travels were defined by my sweet tooth.

Still, my memories are strong of Stewart's Crumbs Along the Mohawk, a graham cracker ice cream with graham cracker pieces and a caramel swirl.

Eating it was revelatory.

One usually uses of the label "acquired taste" for a flavor that challenges one's flavor sensibilities, something strong and usual. No one would ever describe a flavor as benign as graham crackers as an acquired taste. That said, it wasn't until I had Crumbs Along the Mohawk (named for the Mohawk Trail) that I awakened to the flavor of graham.

Certain flavors appeal to us more as we get older and that phenomenon is bolder than merely "acquiring" a taste. The sensation is more like learning you have a long-lost sibling who loves you very, very much.

Crumbs Along the Mohawk, I salute you!

Jeni's Frozen Dessert Sandwiches

A product about as high quality as my photo skills.

Maybe it's the holiday spirit getting into me, but these were ho ho ho hum. Now for the airing of grievances:

First off, "frozen dessert sandwiches"? Not "ice cream sandwiches"? Jeni, you done me wrong. You wouldn't serve these in your shops, so why are you pumping them out nationwide. Jeni, you are lending your luxury ice cream name to a low-end product.

Second, the options are basic. Mint chocolate, sure. But is there a mix-in or imaginative twist I have come to expect from Jeni's? Nope. As for "bramble berry," let's call it what it really is: "mixed berry." And key lime? ...Okay, that is still pretty uncommon. But theirs offers nothing new.

Third, the actual flavors are nondescript, totally lacking depth. Does the mint ice cream use actual mint? Nope; it's peppermint oil. The mixed berry is is vaguer than vague. Miscellaneous tartness. The key lime is run of the mill as far as key lime stuff goes, which is to say it's mildly sour, but primarily sweet.

Fourth, the cookies part, while good, is the dominant flavor. Why might that be? Because these are teeny tiny. The size of the product is the only part that actually resembles fancy pants food because it is downright dainty.

Fifth, how dare you.

Jeni's Frozen Dessert Sandwiches. Skip 'em.

Parlor Doughnuts (located in multiple states)

Pictured: Cookies N' Cream, Cherry Cheesecake,
Coconut Cream, and Hibiscus Glazed

I have seen the future and it is Parlor Doughnuts. Just as Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams has grown from a humble Columbus, Ohio operation into a nationwide phenomenon, so will Parlor Doughnuts take over the USA. They are already off to a good start with locations in 13 states. Happily, I have eaten at them thrice: twice in Indiana (including their headquarters in Evansville) and once in Kentucky on my recent tour de south.

So what makes Parlor Doughnuts so special? Creative flavors, new spins on classics, and a donut design that is guaranteed to please.

What is this doughnut design, you ask? Beyond being gigantic, these doughnuts solve the cronut problem. Parlor Doughnuts makes layered doughnuts, fried to perfection with a crisp exterior and a flaky, doughy middle. Whatever they have done to seal the exterior successfully keeps the oil from seeping into the center--my biggest complaint with cronuts. They are neither a yeast doughnut nor a cake doughnut. Appearance-wise, Parlor's doughnuts are like croissants baked into a circle, whereas cronuts looked like doughnuts, only taller. And best of all: ALL of their doughnuts are made in this style, unlike cronuts which were always a specialty doughnut in short supply.

In my three visits to Parlor Doughnuts, I have tried a bunch of flavors: Strawberry Shortcake, Cookies N' Cream, Turtle, Coconut Cream Filled, Raspberry Pistachio, Hibiscus Glazed, Cherry Cheesecake, and their best seller, French Toast. Some of their doughnuts have filling, while others offer creative toppings. My favorites have been Hibiscus Glazed, which is their classic doughnut with no filling, and French Toast, which has cinnamon on top and layers of maple within. A lot of their flavors skew in the dessert column vs. the breakfast column, but for an occasional treat I will make an exception and eat dessert for breakfast.

Another cool thing is that each Parlor Doughnuts location has a unique logo. My only complaint is that the headquarters in Evansville, IN was out of their location-specific XL shirts.