Dulce de Licious!

I used to be an ice-creamaholic back in India. I've visited the Arun ice-cream in Ashok Nagar countless times and a cup of vanilla ice-cream was a given at the end of the meal at any hotel. Digging into the small ice-cream cup with the distinctive, small wooden spoon was a simple pleasure I remember very well.

But it was always cups for me. I was never a cone ice-cream fan. I've bought a few cone ice-creams when I was out with friends since eating the cone somehow looked cooler and more macho than eating from a cup(the tiny spoon didn't help). Even the shopkeeper looked at me with disdain if I ordered a cup! But I was never able to finish the scoop in the cone before it melted. So my attempts usually ended up with me twisting and turning the cone in a mad race to lick the ice cream up from all sides before it dripped down my hand. And I always lost the race. I realized soon enough that that looked way less cool and manly than eating from a cup! The kuchi ice was worse. Without the buffer of the cone, I was forced to lick even more furiously to keep the ice-cream on the kuchi until I finished it. Needless to say, I wasn't a kuchi ice fan either.

Strangely, I've never been big on ice-creams all these years in the US. I've bought a few cans of ice-cream but after a couple of scoops, they ended up in the back of the freezer, frozen and forgotten. I've also tried out the ice-creams at stores like Baskin-Robbins but never got hooked.

And then I found Cold Stone Creamery. Their Banana Caramel Crunch made me exclaim that it was the best ice-cream I've ever had and made me return to the store for more. More importantly, it helped me zero in on the one ingredient that made the ice-cream taste so mouth-wateringly yummy to me - caramel. So I went to the grocery stores hunting for ice-creams with caramel. After a few tries, I finally landed upon Dreyers Dulce de Leche, which is caramel ice-cream with swirls of golden caramel. With two caramels, how could I go wrong?! I didn't. It tastes amazingly good and has me completely hooked. Even since I started buying it, my day isn't over until I have a couple of scoops of it.

I'm having it even as I'm typing this and as the caramel and the ice-cream together melt in my mouth, I'm truly in ice-cream heaven...