There is no shame in the occasional indulgence. As long as your actions don’t hurt anybody and you don’t cross the invisible line of no return, joy becomes you during the indulgence of booze, pizza, burritos, fried food and ice cream. Especially ice cream. And especially the ice cream at Sweet Cow.
Sweet Cow is indulgent. It is so creamy, so flavorful. It tastes like homemade ice cream, but it comes in unique flavors that finally elevate ice cream to something exciting. Changing flavors every two weeks, there is genuine excitement about what new flavor Sweet Cow will produce next.
And so I recently did something at Sweet Cow that I’m not sure should exist because of the level of indulgence. I had an unofficial ice cream flight at Sweet Cow. Unsure if it was my zenith or my rock bottom, the only other time I’ve felt so simultaneously bipolar about my station in life was when I looked up halfway through a three-course meal at a Friendly’s in New Jersey and caught my pudgy reflection in the mirror.
But with six flavors of ice cream and a homemade ice cream sandwich, it was easier to see the variety and the depth of flavor in each of those varieties that Sweet Cow coaxes out.
On the far left were two classics: mint chocolate chip and chocolate chip cookie dough. The former had a brighter mint than you’ll find in other mint chip ice creams, and it was not overdone by any excessive use of extracts. The chips were crunchy flakes of dark chocolate.
The cookie dough in the second cup was really well done. It wasn’t grainy or overpowering. It wasn’t too chewy or doughy. It was a perfect, moist bite that had just enough resistance and whose integrity was not compromised by the wetness or coldness of the cream around it. The base vanilla ice cream was understated and delicious.
Moving to the center of the flight, I found oatmeal cookie and chocolate peanut butter pretzel. The most remarkable note about these two varieties was the stunning flavor found in each. The oatmeal cookie ice cream was a perfect representation of its cookie cousin, with sweet cinnamon, brown sugar and oatmeal covering the palate on each bite. The high density of Sweet Cream’s ice cream was also a perfect texture for the oatmeal cookie flavor.
The chocolate peanut butter pretzel, likewise, was masterfully flavored. The chocolate tasted like a chocolate factory smells, which is a stupid thing to say if you’ve never lived by or visited a chocolate factory, but pretty evocative if you have (if I do say so myself ). The peanut butter was tasty and expertly proportioned. The only complaint here was the pretzel — it was soggy.
I encountered the soggy filling again with a Cap’n Crunch flavored ice cream. As an avid consumer of Cap’n Crunch, this was one of my favorite ice creams of all time. The creamy vanilla base was like whole milk to the sugars and crunchies of the cereal within. But I just feel like Sweet Cow missed an opportunity to see an adult man’s head spontaneously explode by not figuring out a way to make the crunch berries crunch.
The last cup was a mix (the suggestion of our friendly scooper) of nutella and banana chocolate chip ice creams. The combination was fantastic, no doubt, but the flavor in the banana ice cream was most impressive. It tasted like a perfectly ripe banana, and the whole setup was a fun take on a sundae.
Same goes for the flavor of the coffee ice cream in the ice cream sandwich — made with grounds from Ozo coffee, it was like eating the scent of freshly ground beans.
Not surprisingly, Sweet Cow is expanding. Already with two shops in Louisville and Denver, the Boulder location recently opened and a fourth is set to open in the Table Mesa Shopping Center. Right across from the Boulder Weekly office. This could be interesting for me.
