Cold Stone Creamery

The Founder's Favorite

I’ve been wanting to check out the Cold Stone Creamery up at Bloor and Dufferin since last year but for some reason never got around to it even though it’s about a 30 minute walk from my house.

Then last night, while at Dufferin Mall, Husband suggested that we go check it and so we did. Unfortunately, it was a disappointing experience.

And an expensive one; our two medium “Signature Creations” cost over $10 (and that was without the fancy waffle bowl that you see in the picture). Now, I would have been fine paying that if the ice cream was great. But not only was it not great, it wasn’t even good.

I had the Mint Mint Chocolate Chocolate Chip, which saw mint ice cream combined with a brownie, chocolate chips and chocolate fudge sauce, while Husband had a Founder’s Favorite, made with sweet cream ice cream, a brownie, pecans and caramel and chocolate fudge sauce. Both of these items sound amazing and they certainly looked delicious but sadly their taste was really, “meh”.

The big problem, and Husband agrees 100% with me, is the ice cream itself. It’s lacking in flavour and has that “cold” taste to it that old ice cream has. It also has an almost gooey texture that makes it rather messy to eat. Overall, it doesn’t taste or feel like ice cream and the whole time I was eating it, I kept thinking, “What is in this?”. 

If I had had just the ice cream, I likely wouldn’t have finished it. Thankfully, there were the “mix-ins” to distract my taste buds. I did quite like the brownie, it was moist and chewy, while the chocolate chips add a nice bit of crunchy, chocolatinest. The fudge sauce didn’t do much but it didn’t taste odd either.

Unfortunately, my mix-ins weren’t that well mixed into my ice cream so I sort of ended with half of a treat that tasted just OK and half that was actually yummy (basically, as long as I had a chuck of brownie and some chocolate chips on my spoon, it was good).

The other issue with mix-ins is that they are what drives the price of the ice cream up. You get one mix-in free and then after that, you have to pay. And since the base ice cream is so crappy, I imagine that most people but at least two mix-ins or, like Husband and I did, opt for a Signature Creation.

The sight of the mix-ins made me think of the wonderful US chain Pinkberry, which is kind of like Cold Stone Creamery only with delicious frozen yogurt and the option to have as many different kinds of mix-ins as the store has. I wish we had Pinkberries here in Toronto.

Would I buy this again:  No.
Should you buy it: Save your money and get a Dairy Queen Blizzard instead.