Happy Monday! Just as a reminder, our giveaway for Taste of Hillcrest ends tomorrow so don’t forget to enter for the event taking place on Saturday, April 18th. On to ice cream! Anh has a nose for sweets and her dessert radar is much more powerful than mine, especially when something comes from Northern California to us here in San Diego. We’ve been tracking its opening and heard rumors a new ice cream sandwich place had opened, but it turned out to be wishful thinking at the time.
Alas, a few weeks ago they did open its doors to the public and we got a chance to check them out in person. Full disclosure, Diddy Riese up in Westwood has always been our go to place for ice cream sandwiches ever since I was a youngling. So when Cream opened here, I had to look over my shoulder to see what just walked into the doorstep of my hood. It’s like looking into the eyes of my brother’s new girlfriend. Is she good for him or not?
Their concept is simple. Order ice cream, cookies, or ice cream sandwiches consisting of two cookies and an ice cream of your choosing. Yes they do have other items like an ice cream taco or fruit bars, but come on. Toppings are 75 cents each added to the $2.99 ice cream sandwich. I have to admit, their pictures with various toppings online looked enticing.
We went the second week of opening and I wouldn’t say it was crazy busy, but there were a lot of things going on. Put it this way, it wasn’t not busy. Here my ice cream sandwich maker is scooping mint chocolate chip ice cream between a double chocolate chip and white chocolate macadamia nut cookies.
She had a really hard time putting the ice cream sandwich in the small bag. Such a hard time, my sandwich was kind of deconstructed and split in half. It looks so sad 🙁 Also, I was expecting a little more oreo cookies. I’ve never given thought to how much 75 cents worth of oreo cookies would get me, but I did think it would be more than what I got. No matter, “as long as it tastes good” I said to myself. Part of it was good, but the other part was so so. I wasn’t a huge fan of the double chocolate chip cookie. I expected more chocolate flavor since it was “double”, but instead I got maybe a 1/2 chocolate chip cookie. On the contrary, the white chocolate macadamia nut cookie was tasty as was the mint chocolate chip ice cream in the middle. Good enough for me to try it again and experiment with another cookie combo.
Anh’s sandwich maker did a splendid job on hers. She got a regular chocolate chip cookie (best choice at Diddy!) and also a snicker doodle cookie. They weren’t bad, but my enjoyment lay somewhere in the middle between the double chocolate chip and the white macadamia nut. The green tea ice cream turned out smooth and full of strong green tea flavor.
Sorry I couldn’t get a better picture of this. Before our sandwiches started to melt even more we took a bite out of each one. I was trying to capture the size difference between the sandwiches. Hers had to be at least twice the size of mine. In looking at other pictures online, I don’t think this was on purpose. We’ll just chalk it up to opening month things to work out.
I’ll probably try them again in the future, but in our first experience we didn’t uncover the Diddy Riese slayer. At least not yet. Anyone else have a killer ice cream sandwich go to place?
Cream
5157 College Ave., Ste B
San Diego, CA 92115
www.creamnation.com
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It’s kind of amazing to me that CREAM made it all the way to San Diego; I remember them as a small shop that started in Berkeley selling $0.50 ice cream sandwiches to poor hungry college kids. I’ll have to stop by sometime and reminisce 🙂
That’s funny your childhood cheap ice cream sandwich place has come all this way. I have that same nostalgic feeling about Diddy. Although I think they were a $1 when I started going there. Looks like Cream is expanding like crazy. They are set to open in PB too!