Coffee Ice Cream Taste Test

February 9, 2019 11:28 AM

Remember how I said most of my impulse purchases are seafood? Well the rest of them are ice cream. I'm not a huge dessert person, but I absolutely love ice cream, and I especially love coffee ice cream.

I love it so much that I get super angry at Giant Eagle for having 15 versions of vanilla and barely any coffee.

Now I'm on a mission to find the best coffee ice cream.

We sampled four different brands: Edy's, Trader Joe's, Haagen-Dazs, and Graeter's. Here they are, ranked from worst to first.

4. Graeter's Vienna Coffee

I don't know why, but I had higher hopes for this brand. Out of the four scoops of ice cream, this was definitely the one with the least flavor. It was also incredibly air-y. My sister said it was more like foam than cream. As of right now at Giant Eagle, a pint costs $5.49 (on sale). I don't think I'll ever buy it again.

3. Edy's Slow Churned Coffee

This was the most mainstream of all the ice creams. It was also, by far, the sweetest. This is the brand of ice cream that I've usually gotten, but I wish their coffee had more of a coffee flavor. Good texture though. While I wouldn't go out of my way to get Edy's coffee, if I see a 1.5 quart for $3.50 (on sale), I'll still grab it.

2. Haagen-Dazs Coffee

I've always liked Haagen-Dazs, but rarely bought it because of the price. What I noticed about this scoop was that it had a more subtle flavor, less coffee and more toffee or caramel. It was $3.99 (on sale) for slightly less than a pint. Even though I thought it tasted better than the scoop of Edy's ice cream, I'd probably still buy Edy's over it because of the price.

1. Trader Joe's Coffee Bean Blast

The first time I tried Trader Joe's coffee ice cream, I was really surprised at how good it was. It is the most coffee-y coffee ice cream I've ever had, and the texture is amazing. Incredibly creamy. Compared to the other three brands, it absolutely stands out. I mean it even stands out in the picture because of how much darker it is. One quart is $3.99, and it's the only reason I ever go to Trader Joe's.

I know I ranked them and criticized them, but they're all still coffee ice cream so they're all still delicious. Maybe we'll try some more brands and have another taste test.

Ice cream tub pictures are taken directly from the ice cream manufacturer's websites, since we forgot to actually take pictures of the containers.

Holy crap, I forgot I had a wordpress site

January 13, 2019 10:14 AM

So, I came up with a great idea a few weeks ago. My little sister is staying with me for a few months, and she loves food photography. I like cooking, but whenever I take pictures of my own food it's super ugly, mostly because I don't know the first thing about photography, let alone food photography. But my aunt is always asking me what I'm cooking, and I want a better way to show her that I'm being a functioning adult. So I decided that I should create an Instagram and post awesome pictures of food that I make and my sister takes!

Anyway, I downloaded the app on my phone, created an account, and attempted to set a username. I kept getting an error, so I decided to restart the app and login again. Then I got this message:

"Your account has been disabled for violating our terms."

WHAT?! I didn't even post a single picture! I actually attempted to restore my account (the link to do so was super hard to find by the way), to which I received an email:

"Thanks for contacting us. Before we can help, we need you to confirm that you own this account.

Please reply to this email and attach a photo of yourself holding a hand-written copy of the code below.

[Redacted]

Please make sure that the photo you send:

• Includes the above code hand-written on a clean sheet of paper, followed by your full name and username

• Includes both your hand that's holding the sheet of paper and your entire face

• Is well-lit, and is not too small, dark or blurry

• Is attached to your reply as a JPEG file"

WHAT?! Now you need my face?! This seemed suuuper sketchy to me, so I did some googling and reading about Instagram on Reddit, and yes, this is totally legit. I actually started to try and get this picture of myself taken, until I realized that I needed my username in the picture, and I wasn't even sure if I had successfully set a username. So at that point I said "Screw this."

Yeah, I write code for a living, and yet I'm awful at technology. I should have let my little cousin create the Instagram account for me. But anyway, Plan B. I'm going to start a food blog. Food blogs are the reason I can even cook in the first place. (Perhaps a future blog post will explain my initial foray into cooking) And I love reading food blogs.

Now even though I like programming, I decided that this project will mainly be focused on food, sentences, and pictures. Not code. Not system administration. I've created a website on my own before, but I didn't want to deal with the overhead for this. So WordPress it is. Maybe once I have a decent amount of posts, I'll consider moving this content into my own domain and actually make the site look less generic.

Oh yeah, as I was creating a WordPress site, I realized I already had one. From over 5 years ago. Since then, I stopped using Linux desktop and have switched to a Chromebook. Hopefully I actually keep up with the blog posting this time.

For now, here's a poorly taken photograph of some tacos I made last year.