Cinema Snack- Target: Cherry Hill, NJ

Cinema Snack- Target: Cherry Hill, NJ

This item has already been covered by a lot of food blogs, but I wanted to give it a try for myself (and I was craving ice cream), so let's see if this popcorn flavored dessert was worth the impulse buy!

The carton's design is very basic, but this is one of Target's store branded items, so that's to be expected. This is basically a modern day no frills item, but even the no-frills food is quite frilly these days. (Some of you might remember the true no frills products from a decade or two ago. Plain as plain can be and a little scary.) The image of the ice cream on the front of the packaging is nice, but other than that, this design is very blah.

I opened the carton and began making my first scoop. (Look at that fancy caramel swirl I got going on in my scoop shot! It looks like a delicious ice cream-y snail shell.) As you can see, I got plenty of mix-ins in my first scoop and, although I haven't gotten too deep into the container, from what I can see on the surface, this ice cream has a pretty good mix-in to ice cream ratio.

This two scoop little sundae is looking pretty good, but it's melting really quickly under my photo lights, so I better hurry up and give this a try before it turns into ice cream soup.

To start, I tried some of the sweet, popcorn flavored base on it's own, and the flavoring was very reminiscent of kettle corn. It may look like your average vanilla ice cream, but it's really light, a bit salty, and sweet. It may not taste exactly like popcorn, but it has that glazed kettle corn taste that I love, and I thought it was surprisingly authentic, especially the popcorn-y aftertaste. When you mix the creamy base with a bit of the salted caramel swirl, the flavoring becomes more like caramel popcorn, which is my favorite, and I found that to be really enjoyable. As for the "fudge" coated pretzels and chips, they added a bit of texture and chocolatey flavoring, but I really wasn't a fan. The chocolate coated bits seem to be more of a gimmick, and they didn't add anything to this flavor, other than crunchiness. I personally would have preferred waffle cone bits or actual bits of popcorn, but this was still very enjoyable.

Now, I'm one of those people who hates the Jelly Belly buttered popcorn bean, and I loved this ice cream. It was surprisingly light, flavorful, and the caramel swirls paired really well with the kettle corn flavored ice cream. My boyfriend on the other hand, loves that disgusting evil popcorn jelly bean, and at first he said that this ice cream didn't taste like popcorn at all. The second time I gave him a taste he said it tasted a lot more popcorn-y, but he still wasn't a fan of this ice cream. He liked it, but he wouldn't buy a carton for himself. So if you're a buttered popcorn jelly bean fan, this ice cream might not be for you, but I really enjoyed it. Although I wish the chocolate mix ins were replaced with something else (I mean who eats chocolate pretzels and chips at the movies anyway? It's called "Cinema Snack" afterall) I would still buy another carton of this in the future, just for the ice cream mixed with caramel swirls.

© Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net

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