The Lick Me Everywhere Stimulus Plan

Last night's SOTU was not only kind of a snooze, it also missed the mark.  America doesn't need another Sputnik moment.  It needs more ice cream shops - ice cream shops that sell delicious flavors like Gingerbread Crumble, Burnt Cinnamon and Brown Sugar Oats and Walnut.  Ice cream shops that buy from local farmers, that employ local people, and that use American-made equipment.  That is how we will win the future! That's the message I took from Kendra Baker and Zach Davis, the founders of the Penny Ice...

Top Chef: Just Desserts finalist joins LA Creamery

She looks nice.  Photo courtesy of LA Eater. LA Eater reports that chef Danielle Keene is joining the artisan ice cream shop LA Creamery as Corporate Pastry Chef.  Here are some of the new flavors allegedly in the works: Hot Chocolate flavored with chili powder, cinnamon, vanilla bean and cocoa nibs; Milk Chocolate Chai flavored with black tea and seven spices; Sassafras flavored with sassafras bark;...

Cold Stone Creamery = Fancy Ice Cream?

I'm not sure what his go-to ice cream is, but Dow Jones newswriter Al Lewis sure threw me a curveball when it turned out the "fancy" ice cream he describes in a recent article was actually Cold Stone Creamery.  By "fancy," does he mean "expensive"?  Or "overpriced"?  Or maybe "gross"?  According to Lewis' article, Cold Stone's sales grew over 20% from 2005 to 2007, but then plunged over 11% in 2008. ...

Pint-sized Haagen Dazs pints

The Daily News reports today that as commodities prices rise, food companies are shrinking package sizes.  Not like the smaller cap on Poland Spring bottles that saves plastic, but actually quantitatively less food. Small children in America already grow up with our confusing non-metric, or customary, measurement system, and now to confuse them further, a gallon is 59 ounces, according to Tropicana, and a pint is...

Best lead sentence of the year, so far

From the Bellingham Herald, a newspaper in Washington.  Oh boy. "Despite temperatures below freezing Sunday night, Jan. 2, a hungry man stole an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen and scarfed it down, according to police." I really love "...and scarfed it down, according to police."  I wonder if "scarfed" was the word used in the police report. Adam S. Wilgus, 24, the culprit, later told officers "he didn't have enough money to pay for the cake and was hungry. He also told officers he had eaten the cake while...

Two of my favorite things, together: David Hasselhoff + ice cream

Photo by ICON/Fame pictures, courtesy of Celebrity Smack Blog (whatever that is) Some things were destined to be together, and David Hasselhoff + ice cream promotion are certainly two phenomena that fit together so naturally that one wonders why this didn't happen, say, 20 years earlier when he was actually on TV.  For me, he was more of a draw before he went gray and when he looked like he could truly save me...

Anorexic model tasted ice cream before she died

From her blog Last night my mom told me about a news story from last week that I had missed, about the death of Isabelle Caro, a French fashion model who struggled with anorexia from her earliest days.  It was a very, very sad story to begin with, but what truly touched me, and not simply because I'm obsessed with ice cream, is that according to the New York Times obituary, she wrote on her blog: “I still...

Update: It is winter. That means chestnut ice cream at Grom.

It is winter.  There was a blizzard.  Michael Bloomberg did not handle it well.  That is the bad news. The good news is that Grom's marron glacé flavor is back.  It is best paired with the regular chocolate ice cream (not the dark chocolate sorbet; that flavor is for masochists and sophisticates).  Also be sure to ask for the chestnut flavor first because whichever flavor you request first they will give you a bigger scoop of that o...