Sunday, April 12, 2009

The Travel Bug & Food Bytes: Ice Cream is happiness condensed - Jessi Lane Adams (Cold Stone Creamery)

Originating from the US, the Cold Stone Creamery is now part of a chain in Japan. Usually the "normal" ice-cream in Japan is already much better than most that you can get in Singapore (suspect this is because of the superior milk and cream available there). Cold Stone Creamery takes it a level further, "chopping" up the ice-cream and mixing it with other ingredients to make it even more interesting.

The trick about this ice cream, is that the ingredients (ie ice cream, cake, chocolate, toppings etc) are not pre-mixed and then frozen together. Rather, they are individually chopped up and prepared on a specially cooled metal plate (ie "cold stone"). This ensures that the ice cream doesn't melt too much in the process, the ingredients are not frozen together becoming tasteless, and everything is in large chunks which makes eating it more interesting. Some places in Singapore do sell something similar (eg Island Creamery's pineapple biscuits during CNY), but it doesn't taste as good because all the items are mixed in small bits and frozen.

We checked out this branch at Level 5 of Lumine Est at Shinjuku. You can customise the flavours and ingredients of mix you want, or choose from their many suggested combinations. We decided to share the Strawberry Cheesecake and their Valentine's Day special, the Bitter Romantic Moment.

For the Strawberry Cheesecake, first goes the ice-cream spread, topped with chunks of crumbly butter cake...

... followed by strawberries and cream

This then gets chopped up into bits and mixed together before being scopped up into a wafer cup.

The finished product!

The Bitter Romantic Moment is a mix of bitter chocolate ice cream, raspberries, cacao cake and fudge. First was the bitter chocolate ice cream again spread out on the cold stone, followed by fudge and raspberries...

... then the cake is added and the mixture chopped up and mixed.

Tada!


I heard a rumour that Cold Stone Creamery is available in Singapore, but I don't know where the location is. Anyone able to shed some light?

2 comments:

John and Debbie said...

Isn't this the same as cold rock creamery in Holland Vee?

K K said...

yeah... someone else also wrote to tell me so. obviously I haven't been frequenting that area!

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