I bought this cool treat because of the gimmick that it offered. It’s not that I didn’t think (or hope) that this treat was more than just a gimmick, it’s just the thing that attracted me to this treat was the fun I was hopping to have. The gimmick of this treat is that with a little bit peeling and folding, you can turn a regular looking ice cream treat into a sort of abstract 4 tentacled octopus. I know that octopuses have eight tentacles, but it’s the though that counts. I managed to peel the upper layer fairly easily, and I was pretty satisfied that my treat looked like the one on the package. As far as I could tell the gimmick worked, and you could in fact make this cool treat look like a minimalist abstract octopus. The question is however, how well did it do in the taste and texture categories, because novelty is only one score.
I’ll start with the good points, although there’s really not too many. The only part of this cold treat that I can say I was happy with was the small amount of chocolate in the center of the upper half of this treat. I would have liked this chocolate center to have continued throughout the entire treat, but it did not. The other positive of this treat was the blue outer coating that made up the tentacles. It was a very unique texture, best described as gummy like. It’s a unique texture for an ice cream treat, and it functioned well for the tentacles. This is what I liked about this cold treat, but there are many things I do not like.
First and foremost, there are a few problems with the various flavours going on here. The blue gummy was a kind of fake berry flavour and the strawberry ice cream was flavourless. That means that the blue fake berry flavour dominated completely. Worse still is that this blue gummy flavour did not work well with the yummy chocolate center at the top half of this treat. I think if the strawberry flavour dominated it might have worked so much better. As mentioned above, I was also disappointed that the chocolate was only at the top of this treat. The chocolate was the best feature of this ice cream bar, but only part of the first few bites. Finally, while I liked the uniqueness of the gummy texture, I was fairly sick of it after the first few bites. I’m not sure how you could cut down on the amount of gummy without ruining the octopus quality of this treat, but it was a problem.
I’m happy that the people at Heartbrand tried something new, but I just wish they payed a little bit more attention to some of the details. With a little refinement this could be a great and unique treat, as it stands, it‘s not great.