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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Lucy Knight

Scoop of the year! We taste-test 99 of 2026’s most unusual ice creams, from the unbeatable to the unlickable

A woman with short brown hair wearing a white T-shirt and pink shirt holding an ice cream waffle cone with a baby carrot instead of a chocolate flake
Lucy Knight on her mammoth taste test. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

What’s with all the weird ice-cream flavours this year? It feels as if supermarkets and independent companies are vying to make the most novel alternatives to a good old scoop of vanilla. But which are actually worth having? I tried 99 varieties of ice-cream tubs and ranked them from sickeningly sweet to dinner party-worthy.

99. Paxo sage and onion stuffing, Anya Hindmarch
(One scoop £4.50 or 500ml tub £16, The Ice Cream Project, London)
Anya Hindmarch’s Ice Cream Project has become a yearly summer fixture, in which the fashion designer collaborates with well-known brands to create nostalgic novelty flavours (at designer prices) for which customers queue round the block. This year the flavours skew toward roast dinners, and include Oxo (which I couldn’t try, being vegetarian) and Paxo. It tastes exactly like the stuffing … which isn’t really what I want from an ice-cream. Taste 1/10, Value 1/10, Originality 7/10

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