Review: Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Therapy Ice Cream

So I took a siesta from reviewing Ben & Jerry's products on the blog for a long time, so I'm trying to catch up on reviews of some of their classic flavors, but also some of their newer flavors as well.  It's one of those newer flavors that leads me to this already oft-reviewed Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Therapy Ice Cream that I picked up at Meijer on sale for $2.50.  This pint of ice cream contains the standard four half-cup servings and each serving in the pint is a relatively tame (for Ben & Jerry's) 250 calories.  The best part about this was that this one really was therapy for me since I had a rough day at work prior to trying this out (Like how I worked that in like a great writer?  Ha!).

When Ben & Jerry's says this is chocolate therapy, they mean it because there is a chocolate in several different ways packed into this strongly chocolate-smelling pint.  I'll let them describe that myriad of ways via the description on their website:  "Chocolate ice cream with chocolate cookies & swirls of chocolate pudding ice cream."  Yep, it's classic Ben & Jerry's and by that I mean that they are trying to compress as many crazy things into one little paper container as humanly possibly (or possible by machine, I guess, since that's what packed this).  First I'll touch on the cookies and they were pretty much typical chocolate cookies, similar to what you'd find in an Oreo cookie.  They were a bit more dense than those thin wafers, but they were well spread throughout the pint.  What made the composition of this pint quite interesting though was the chocolate pudding ice cream.  It added an almost airy and exceptionally fluffy texture to the ice cream itself.  It wasn't creamy like a typical ice cream and that was quite a change of pace and something I would have never really expected.  Being that I'm an avowed pudding lover (and also chocolate), I was incredibly anxious to dive right in.

When I dove in, I can't say that airiness had any sort of resemblance to pudding, but it was definitely different.  If I had to compare it to anything, I would almost say that it was like a mousse, which was definitely quite odd.  As for its chocolate flavor, it was pretty much standard stuff.  It wasn't overly sweet, but it was particularly dense.  The cookies just added to that chocolate flavor as they just added more chocolate to the equation, although the fact that they brought some crunch to the pint added an additional textural contrast to each spoonful as it had airy chocolate pudding ice cream, mixed with thick regular chocolate ice cream and then crunch of a cookie.  It was airy, thick and crunchy all at once and was like something that I had not experienced before.

Buy It or Fly By It?  This one was merely above average in my book and didn't re-define my life at all, but it was still a solid and enjoyable flavor, so it gets a BUY IT rating.  If your are looking for your chocolate fix (or therapy), this is an excellent option because it is all chocolate, all the time.  I guess the inclusion of chocolate pudding ice cream in here got my expectations up a bit too high and let me down a bit, but that's not anything against this flavor.  That's got more to do with my own self-lunacy.  My lunacy aside, I'd certainly encourage you to pick this up if you are indeed looking for therapy.

BUY IT!!

Other Reviews:
*On Second Scoop
*The Ice Cream Informant