the sweet scrapbook

Brain connections made, let's get back to the ice-cream. Ice-Mastry. Garden Party range. Chocolate with Cherries (original: Czekoladowe z Wisniami). Thank you, Google Translate! The core is pretty obvious, but I wasn't sure whether it was "and" or "with" and "cherry" or "cherries" (the Polish word for "cherries" somehow resembles the Romanian one, that's why it was easy for me to make the connection). Oh, no, they've redesigned the website! It wasn't great before, but it looks horrible now. It takes longer to load, it says even less about the individual products (it didn't say much before, it just listed the name, but now it doesn't even do that) - it looks like they've fixed this aspect now. Good thing I still have a screenshot of how the page for the Garden Party range looked before. Yes, already having screenshots of various pages of their website does mean I have tried other products from them in the past. I first came across Ice-Mastry last summer (2009) and I have fond memories about the Garden Party Almond with Zabaione Sauce (which was one of the first two Garden Party boxes I've ever tried and I didn't expect much because, well, I didn't really like how the box looked, I thought it was ugly) and the Chocolate Basala.

Unfortunately, their about page isn't working anymore and I don't have a screenshot of that (I didn't think about checking it before). That got fixed as well, it now works, but it's only in Polish and I can only understand a few words. So all I know about them is from polishmarket.com.pl:

Ice cream products made by Ice-Mastry are widely acclaimed in Poland for their unique flavour, even though they are produced on the same type of machines that are used by giant manufacturers in the sector. Ice-Mastry ice cream tastes differently. It tastes better. It tastes definitely Polish.
Ice-Mastry offers a consistently ever-larger variety of ice cream goods. An assortment of 80 product lines in 166 different flavourings is currently on sale.
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Coming back to this Garden Party Chocolate with Cherries. It was a flavour I had not seen before, and I haven't seen since. And it was the only such box they've had. I was obviuosly drawn to this one since chocolate + cherry = a combination that I generally like. The name said something about chocolate and cherries and I initially assumed it was some chocolate ice-cream with some cherry syrup (assumption based on memories about most other ice-creams whose names combined chocolate and cherries).

I got home with it and one of the first things I did was to open the box. And I saw that I was wrong - it wasn't chocolate ice-cream with cherry syrup, it was chocolate ice-cream with a sort of a chocolate syrup and with whole cherries as well with pieces of cherries. I was a little disappointed at first as I would have preferred cherry syrup, I don't really like chewing on fruit in sweets. However, these cherries tasted nice enough. The ice-cream was already creamy - that's quite normal, if you take into account the fact that it was a warm day and that it took me at least 45 minutes to get home from the other end of the city. It certainly wasn't the creamiest ice-cream that I've tried. The texture cannot compare to that of G7 Gelati or to that of Haagen-Dazs products. But, unlike really crappy ice-creams (I've tried a lot of stuff, so I've tried some of those as well), it didn't have icy particles in the middle and it melted nicely. And it was tasty.

Ingredients: cherries in syrup 10%, water, sugar, skimmed milk powder, vegetable fat, butter, crystalline glucose, dessert couverture (and what's in that?), cocoa, emulsifier (E471), thickening agents (E410, E412), natural chocolate flavour (?).

Storage: keep at temperatures not exceeding -18°C; after defrosting, ice-cream may not be frozen again and consumed. Sorry, I usually cannot do the second one with such big boxes bought from the other part of the city during the summer - they never stay frozen until I manage to get home with them.

Nutritional info per 100g of product: energy 163kcal, protein 2.6g, fat 9g, carbohydrates 18g.

I really don't like the fact that they don't have this info on the website and that I had to write it with the box in front of me. I could have taken a picture of the bottom of the box - unfortunately, I didn't think about it at that time.