by Andrew Post

Created on: April 25, 2008

Anything with the word "fudge" in it gets me going.

Growing up in the Eastern United States, I never lived more than five miles away from a Baskin Robbins. I inherited my mother's bias against fruity-flavored ice cream and so focused instead on chocolate and caramel. I sampled the chocolate spectrum: chocolate chip ice cream, chocolate chip cookie dough, and plain ol' chocolate.

And then, quite suddenly, my frozen dessert chi centered itself. I found out about mocha almond fudge. That wasn't exactly what it was called, but I'm trying to avoid trademark litigation here. Having exhausted Baskin Robbins's supply of chocolaty flavors I broke down and decided to try something with nuts in it, which I had considered abhorrent up to that point. I took one lick and I was hooked. For the remainder of the five years we lived in the East and most of the seven that we lived in California, my heart belonged to the splotchy brown sweetness of mocha almond fudge.

My addiction to fudgy ice cream flavors was almost bound to worsen when I got a summer job at a grocery store. Suddenly I had the whole repertoire of Blue Bunny, Breyer's and Dreyer's at my fingertips. My ice cream tastes went through a cultural revolution. Suddenly I was bringing home tubs of ice cream with names like "Dulce de Leche" and "Moose Tracks." The killer diller, however, was still the fudge combo. It made little difference to me whether the main flavor was vanilla, chocolate, or caramel; heck, it could even have been Neapolitan. As long as it was striated with fudge it satisfied my sole criterion.

My latest fling with fudge occurred just a few weeks ago when I was passing the ice cream freezer and a flavor called "Chocolate Fudge Brownie" caught my eye. I pounced on it instinctively. I soon discovered that that particular variety of ice cream is to other chocolate-flavored sweets what thermite reactions are to sparklers. I tasted it and a chocolate anvil suddenly fell on me. A fudgy explosion took place inside my mouth. It was a power-packed wallop, courtesy of six metric tons of cacao beans.

I know now that I can never go back to swigging Hershey's syrup straight from the bottle or scooping mouthfuls of chocolate milk mix out of the can; all my desires have been fulfilled by the Dreyer's corporation. Chocolate Fudge Brownie has become, without doubt or comparison, my favorite flavor of ice cream.

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