When I was a kid, I would use any leftover lunch money I had to buy one thing – a Heaven chocolate ice-cream. It was chocolate ice-cream in the middle with a milk chocolate shell and a popsicle stick holding it together, and I believed it was the best tasting thing in the universe. I bought it so often, over so many years, I became a walking inflation barometer. Until one day it was discontinued.
Ever since that day, more than 20 years ago, I have been looking for the next great ice-cream stick to spend my life with. So I held the culinary equivalent of a speed-dating session to find it.
I invited five friends over and together we did a semi-blind taste test (some of the ice-creams have branding on the sticks) of 10 different ice-creams on sticks, all found at major Australian supermarkets. We rated them on taste, texture, appearance and structural integrity, with final scores heavily weighted towards taste and texture (because that’s ultimately what matters).
After eating 10 ice-creams in less than an hour, I have three major conclusions. One, the quality of ice-cream found huddled around a stick appears to be inferior to what you’ll find in a tub, even from the same maker. Some aren’t even ice-cream at all – to earn that label at least 10% of the overall weight must be milk fat; if they fall short, brands have to use alternative descriptors like “ice confectionery” or “frozen dessert”.
Two, despite what my teenage self would tell you, there is a limit to how much ice-cream I can enjoy.
And three, like pencils, forks and death, a Golden Gaytime is a rare product that seemingly hasn’t changed since the day it was invented.
The best overall
Magnum Classic pack of 4 x 80g ice-creams, $11 from Coles and Woolworths ($3.44 per 100g)
Score: 3.5/5
Incredibly, this ice-cream looks like the ad: an impeccable smooth chocolate casing that snaps to reveal a soft, milky white centre. And unlike many of its competitors, it tastes like how it looks. The chocolate tastes like it’s made from cocoa and the ice-cream tastes and feels like it has dairy in it. As one reviewer said: “Dependable without being exciting. Almost a caricature of an ice-cream in how perfect it is.”
The best value
Connoisseur Cookies and Cream pack of 4 x 75g ice-creams, $9.50 from Coles and Woolworths ($3.17 per 100g)
Score: 3/5
If you like cookies and cream as a flavour, you’ll like this. The chocolate coating has a satisfying crack and embedded cookie pieces give extra crunch. Instead of those big doughy chunks that are so beloved in tub or gelato versions of this flavour, the “cookies” are little specks dotted throughout, a missed opportunity for textural contrast. If it wasn’t so sweet, this would have been in the running for top spot.
And the rest
Golden Gaytime pack of 4 x 78g ice-creams, $10 from major Australian supermarkets ($3.21 per 100g)
Score: 3/5
I have had so many Golden Gaytimes in my life, many of them by the beach after wonderful days with friends or my mum. Because of that, it was extremely difficult to judge this without a positive bias, something almost all the reviewers shared. What I will say is it tastes like how I remember it: a light caramel-honeycomb flavour with a tiny amount of bitterness, not particularly bold in flavour (aside from the biscuity outer layer, of course), a little salty, and less sweet than other big-brand ice-creams. If we were tasting this for the first time, would it have been a different score? It’s impossible to know.
KitKat Stick pack of 4 x 61g ice confections, $9.50 from Coles and Woolworths ($3.89 per 100g)
Score: 3/5
One of the most common findings of our taste test was good chocolate coating but disastrous ice-cream. This is the best example. The chocolate was full of popping-candy-like crunch and it was so crisp you could hear someone bite into it from across the room. But the “ice-cream” inside was somehow both offensively sweet and a bit flat. It’s faintly reminiscent of a wafer, but since the appeal of wafers is predominantly textural, this just tastes stale. There’s a slightly bitter aftertaste, and some reviewers thought it might be iced coffee flavoured. The point is, to us it didn’t taste like a Kit Kat.
Cadbury Dairy Milk Vanilla pack of 4 x 63g ice confections, $9.50 from Coles and Woolworths ($3.77 per 100g)
Score: 2.5/5
Most of the reviewers thought this was inoffensive, if a little sweet and boring. I disagreed. It starts OK with a good snap and a strong chocolate flavour. But then my eating experience devolved into a post-pubescent flashback, a time when my Easter diet consisted of “chocolate” so dubious, I wonder whether it could even be classified as food these days. The interior is that same basic milk flavour that’s in so many supermarket original, classic or vanilla ice-creams – only it isn’t officially ice-cream.
Kāpiti Passionfruit & Kāmahi Honey Yoghurt Ice Cream Minis pack of 6 x 45g ice-creams, $5.99 from Aldi ($2.22 per 100g)
Score: 2.5/5
As soon as you open the packet, it feels like your sinus is flooded with passionfruit pulp. A wildly different experience to the others, excitingly so. But the problem is getting the actual ice-cream out of the packet and into your mouth. In the pack we bought, the sticks slid out the bottom, the casing held onto the ice-cream with the fortitude of a soggy kebab bag, and the ice-cream was extremely soft and eager to drip everywhere. Oddly, considering the power of the aroma, it tasted pretty light in flavour. To me, there was very little sourness and the yoghurt flavour was as absent as my desire to repeat this taste test.
Gruvi Pistachio Sincero pack of 4 x 60g ice-creams, $10 from Woolworths ($4.17 per 100g)
Score: 2/5
The opposite of a Magnum, it looked nothing like the packet image (it’s weirdly yellow and pale) and eating it is not at all what we expected. The casing has no snap or bite, our teeth just sank into it like cake batter. The pistachios, which are plentiful, provide some crunch but also a whack of saltiness. Inside, the ice-cream is incredibly sweet and soft enough to be confused with whipped cream. All of those facts made it by far the most divisive ice-cream of the day. One reviewer grimaced when he ate it, and later said he wished he could “uneat” it. Another gave it close to full marks, praising the salty-sweet contrast, and wrote on their score sheet: “Wtf, so yum, screw the haters.”
Bulla Vanilla Creamy Classics pack of 4 x 65g ice-creams, $9.50 from Coles and Woolworths ($3.65 per 100g)
Score: 2/5
Out of the products that have the honour of calling themselves ice-cream, this had the lowest score. It tasted affrontingly sweet and, rather than using vanilla (which is prohibitively expensive for a mass-produced product), it’s flavoured with some kind of caramel-like additive – ironic for a brand that uses the registered trademark “unfakeable” on its packaging. (One reviewer, however, liked the caramel-y flavour.) The big surprise for me is that the coating is legally allowed to be called chocolate. It tasted more like the waxy, cloyingly-sweet mystery substance used to make imitation Easter eggs. Luckily it has a good snap.
Denada sugar-free Vanilla and Almond Choc Pops pack of 4 x 63g pops, $12.50 from Coles online ($4.96 per 100g)
Score: 1.5/5
Everyone guessed – incorrectly – this was a vegan ice-cream. That was likely due to the coconut flavour, a hallmark of western wellness-orientated vegan cuisine. Some reviewers guessed the coconut oil in either the chocolate or the ice-cream might be rancid. One said it had a Vaseline texture and another, who spent time on Queensland beaches as a kid, said it “tastes like the smell of the Gold Coast”. There were vanilla-seed flecks throughout the ice-cream, but they didn’t seem to contribute to the flavour. The one reviewer who liked the Denada choc pop appreciated that it was one of the few ice-creams that wasn’t too sweet. Ultimately, because it reminded me of stale mueslis and milkshakes named after goddesses, I personally never want to touch one again.
Pana Organic Hazelnut Frozen Dessert Sticks pack of 4 x 63g frozen desserts, $13.50 from Woolworths ($5.36 per 100g)
Score: 1.5/5
Only one reviewer gave this a 2.5 out of 5 – a passing score – and that was due to the nutty crunch and the snap of the chocolate coating. That same reviewer also thought the nuts might be rancid, the chocolate was weirdly oily and overly sweet, and the interior was “almost plasticky”. Others wrote it tasted or smelt like petrol. The only redeeming features were its appearance, the mild coconut flavour, and that it remained intact until the last bite. This was the most expensive “ice-cream” of the day. It was also the worst.
