Happy Camper
Graham cracker flavored ice cream with graham cracker pieces, a marshmallow swirl, and peanut butter cups
Date Tried - August 27th, 2022
Location - Home, at kitchen counter
Format - Pint
Milkshake It? - No
Buy Again? - No
Lisa correctly identified that this flavor is essentially a fluffer nutter sandwich in the form of an ice cream pint. If you can handle that level of sweetness—the intense, syrupy sweet that pools in the rear corners of your mouth and threatens your overall swallowing ability through sheer viscosity—then Happy Camper is your flavor. It's not good. However, I will say this: the night that I tried it for the first time, I consumed it side by side with several flavors of locally sourced, small batch ice cream that Lisa helped make with her own hands. Happy Camper didn’t deserve to be in the room and it was unfair of us to even enter these fighters into the same ring.
Its downfall is entirely the fault of the graham cracker flavored ice cream; if you substitute this base for something less loud (Vanilla? If it ain't broke don't fix it...) then I could probably eat this whole pint in one sitting. But the overtly powerful base plus the marshmallow swirl plus the peanut butter cups plus the ACTUAL pieces of graham crackers equals shameless excess on Stewart's behalf.
I tried it on a Saturday, spent a large part of Sunday and Monday belt sanding my deck, and then tried it again on Monday evening and it was admittedly less offensive. But an ice cream that requires significant manual labor in order to be tolerable is not an ice cream I want in my life.
Going into Happy Camper, I was slightly concerned that all the flavors were going to be indistinguishably yummy, thus distilling the "purpose" of this endeavor down to a simple validation that I do, in fact, like ice cream. So in a way, I was pleasantly surprised by my dislike for Happy Camper—it quickly proved that quality diversity remains at stake.
So then, onward and upward!
UPDATE: It has been nearly a full month since I wrote this review and the pint of Happy Camper is still in the freezer because nobody wants to finish it. I'd say that is both noteworthy and telling.
I would add that it has a weird gym-socky after taste I am also attributing to the graham crackers. I bought a whole half gallon the week the freezer was empty of peanut butter pandemonium. Never again. I hate to throw out ice cream.