Hudsonville Ice Cream
Hostess might blow Little Debbie out of the water when it comes to the actual taste of their treats, but Little Deb has been offering affordable prices of its snack cakes for decades. The company even debuted a line of ice cream with Hudsonville, slinging frozen renditions of its most popular treats for about $2 a pint. Naturally, we had to try all the Lil' Debbie ice cream flavors and rank them from best to worst.
I'm a fan of strawberry cheesecake ice cream as long as it has chunks of cheesecake, so I had this one pegged as a flavor I might like — and, lo and behold, it was the best of the bunch. It's really just vanilla ice cream with a strawberry swirl, but among a slew of swing-and-miss flavors, it was the clear winner.
Nutty Bars was the only Little Debbie ice cream that tasted like the treat it's based on, even with vanilla ice cream as the base. I'm a fan of chocolate, but I find that chocolate on chocolate topped with more chocolate can be overwhelming. This selection’s vanilla ice cream made it possible to actually taste the crunchy chocolate-peanut butter wafer chunks, so this one deserves my No. 2 spot out of sheer appreciation for its composition.
Zebra Cakes are weak. I said what I said. They're plain. They're dry. And the "chocolate" icing posing as zebra stripes doesn't even taste like chocolate. Given my opinion of what this ice cream treat is modeled after, I would definitely say this is the most surprising flavor in the lineup. It's vanilla ice cream with an actually present chocolate swirl and little pieces of yellow cake throughout. Hard to go wrong there.
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Everything went rapidly downhill starting with Cosmic Brownies. Brownie bits in ice cream is practically my love language, but this rendition made me want to file a formal complaint. The chocolate ice cream had a weird aftertaste, and the brownies were dry, which should be against the law. To seal the deal on this being a flavor I'd never try again, those candy-coated pieces stuck to my teeth. Avoid this Lil' Debbie ice cream flavor if you can.
I want the name of the people involved in dropping the ball on this one. When I decided to do this taste test, Oatmeal Creme Pies was the flavor I was most excited to try. When I bought all seven flavors like someone who uses gluttony to cope with a bad day, the cashier even mentioned that Oatmeal Creme Pies ice cream sounded scrumptious. It's simple, really: Create a vanilla ice cream that tastes like the creme filling; add chunks of oatmeal cookie. That is literally all Little Deb and Hudsonville had to do, and somehow they created a base that tastes like cardboard, complete with virtually flavorless chunks. Thus one of the most disappointing moments of my career was born.
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Honey buns are soft and cakey, so can someone at Hudsonville or Little Debbie explain why this ice cream contains crunchy tidbits? It tasted like overcooked cinnamon rolls, too, making eating this flavor like taking a sip of fountain soda only to find that the syrup needed to be replaced. It was unexpected and unappealing.
If I learned anything from this taste test, it's that Little Debbie's idea of chocolate is skewed. The flavors with chocolate ice cream as the base don't taste like real chocolate ice cream. This no-way-it's-chocolate has a plastic tang, and the texture of the vanilla swirl was downright traumatizing. I tried to consume at least three bites of each flavor to give a thorough review, but I couldn't make it past the second bite of this one.