A review of this year's ice cream festival at the Yarra Valley Chocolaterie, with weird and wonderful flavours like V energy and sweet potato and maple syrup.
The Yarra Valley Chocolaterie, about an hours drive from Melbourne, has a ice cream festival once a year. A month of experimental flavours and ice cream desserts galore in February. If you didn't make it to this year's festival not to worry, I took one for the team and went and did an ice cream tasting at the festival. Thirty minutes and twelve weird and wonderful flavours. Here's my review of the good, the bad and the down right weird.
1.Chocolate Churros - one of my favourites. Sings of cinnamon and pastry. The pastry flavour come through well, but the chocolate not so much. Still tasty none the less.
2. Espresso Martini - allegedly has Kailua in it, but can't really taste it. A decent coffee ice cream
3. Heavenly Cocoa - a vegan ice cream made with coconut milk. Very rich and surprisingly creamy, couldn't really taste the coconut.
4. Honey-berry Nougat - the honey in this is good but is it overpoweringly sweet, really wacks you over the head with the sugar.
5. V energy - tasted like a green fruit tingle (my least favourite colour!). If you like V energy drinks you make like this, but I wasn't a fan.
6. Sweet potato and Maple Syrup - very very weird. Hurts your brain kind of weird. The maple syrup was ok but the texture was extremely weird, it kind of had that floury taste when potato is blended and goes gluey. Not pleasant.
7. Spiced Avocado - with chipotle chilli. Couldn't taste the avocado at all. Flavour was actually not bad, a mild, smokey chilli flavour. Would make a good taco sauce, not so much an ice cream flavour.
8. Berry Obsession - tasted like the jam from a jam donut. Very sweet, could have been improved with more berry tartness.
9. Strawberry Moscato Sorbet - I liked this one, the flavour balance was good, sort of like a moscato slurpee made with strawberries. Got me thinking about experimenting at home, hmmm ...
10. Enchanted Forest - a bright blue ode the kids movies Frozen and Frozen two, but waaaay sweeter than the movies that inspired it. Tasted like hubba bubba bubble gum and not in a good way.
11. Sticky Date Pudding - both mine and the groups favourite, with pieces of pudding in it. Would have been improved by some of the sauce on top swirled through it as well. Very tasty.
12. Watermelon and Mint Sorbet - refreshing but to much mint which made it taste grassy and to sweet.
So there you have it, a review of twelve of the ice cream flavours on offer at this year's Yarra Valley Chocolaterie ice cream festival. Overall I some of the flavours overly sweet, but the Chocolaterie is going for a mass tourist market, so its possible market has a sweeter pallet than mine. It defiantly give me a chance to try some flavours I otherwise wouldn't have tasted or probably experimented with.
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