Ice cream with brandy flavour sauce, fruit conserve with brandy and biscuit pieces. As with the other Lidl seasonal flavour, the Mince Pie tub is slightly smaller at 480ml and just as worryingly soft. The lack of a named flavour for the ice cream in the description (and our taste buds!) led us to believe this is intended to be a plain ice cream. Interestingly, we didn’t actually find this to be a bad thing. Creamy in texture and creamy in flavour, we thought it was a pretty good choice as a base for the additional ingredients.
We liked the big, chewy, juicy fruits in the conserve (currants, apple, sultanas, apricots, and orange and lemon peel) and tasted the brandy both here and in the sauce. It’s surprisingly strong for an ice cream and although we aren’t brandy drinkers at all we really enjoyed it. It isn’t harsh in the slightest and we think it gives the overall flavour more of a “grown up” adult feel.
One thing we weren’t keen on were the biscuit pieces. They were fine – small, crunchy and pretty tasty – but they aren’t authentic at all. Whose ever had a mince pie with bits of biscuit in it? Pastry pieces would have been a much better choice!
our branch of Lidl hadn’t stored it correctly. Still, it meant it was wonderfully creamy and we soon forgot
small they added nothing at all in terms of texture and we only noticed a slightly stronger burst of gingerbread flavour every now and then.
Mint ice cream with chocolatey chunks – a repeat seasonal release from Ben & Jerry’s and the quality of the ice cream is just the same as their standard year round line up. Although we aren’t usually keen on mint flavours, we found the mint ice cream base refreshing and surprisingly addictive.
Vanilla ice cream with fondant sauce and Cadbury milk chocolate – this is a “limited edition” release from Cadbury but it tends to be available year round. We found the vanilla ice cream fairly generic, nothing bad but nothing to write home about but we did agree it was the perfect match for the extremely sugary sweet fondant sauce.
Pigs In Mud is chocolate and marshmallow flavoured ice creams swirled with marshmallow sauce and studded with chocolate pigs and mini marshmallows. The ice cream is typical of Tesco mid range stuff, it’s certainly not luxury or high end stuff but it’s fair for the price with a soft, quite quickly melting texture. The flavours of the ice cream are quite mild but we found the quicker they melted the stronger they became.
and their flavour and texture were fine.
Raspberry ice cream with Marshmallow & Raspberry-Blackberry swirls & Chocolatey cone pieces – yet another winter limited edition, this one is definitely a returner though! Same quality of ice cream we’ve come to expect from Ben & Jerry’s – you know the score.
Pumpkin Cheesecake ice cream with a cookie swirl – this is another winter limited edition from Ben & Jerry’s but we think we spied this one two years in a row so not quite a one hit wonder. Once again same standard of ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s but this is a little odd in that there are no mix ins, just a singular cookie swirl.
Caramel ice cream with a Cinnamon a Swirl & Chunks of Cinnamon Bun Dough – sadly only destined to be a one off seasonal run in the UK, Cinnamon Buns finally arrived here for Christmas 2016. The quality of the ice cream and mix ins is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Ben & Jerry’s and the caramel flavour is much of the same.
Vanilla ice cream with a raspberry ripple, marshmallows and white chocolate curls – don’t scream Halloween to us but Co-Op think otherwise! The vanilla ice cream was thicker and creamier than we thought it’d be but didn’t seem to have much flavour, instead seemingly a “plain” vanilla rather than an authentic.
The Ice Cream edit 