This Popular Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream Flavor Is Actually Our Least Favorite
Baskin-Robbins is a childhood staple for many, because who on earth doesn't love ice cream? (My condolences, lactose-intolerant folks.) While the Baskin-Robbins of my youth never had a grocery store presence, current-day Baskin-Robbins does. You can buy pints of Baskin-Robbins ice cream in major supermarkets basically everywhere now. We recently went through the hard work of trying eight popular Baskin-Robbins flavors to rank them, and one flavor straight-up disappointed us in a somewhat shocking way.
That was the Icing on the Cake flavor, which is your basic birthday cake-flavored ice cream swirled with confetti and rainbow frosting along with cake crumbles. In a ranking, something's inevitably going to end up at the bottom, but this choice wasn't hard. Our writer said, "Coming in last place is Baskin-Robbins Icing on the Cake, and it was not a tough decision. There isn't anything slightly redeeming to lean on to justify its existence in the Baskin-Robbins ice cream lineup. This flavor is bad. Like, really bad."
The main issue, of all things, is the level of sweetness in this ice cream. We found it so sweet that it's practically all we could focus on, and not in a good way. Our taster just couldn't handle the saccharine intensity, and we can't recommend it for that specific reason.
The Baskin-Robbins birthday cake ice cream isn't the only one that hasn't measured up
Our track record with birthday cake-flavored ice cream hasn't been stellar, unfortunately. We ran into the same sugary issue with our taste test of 17 Great Value (Walmart's house brand) ice cream flavors. Just like the Baskin-Robbins situation, the Great Value Birthday Cake flavor came in dead last. Again, our main issue here was that it was intensely sweet to the point where our tester even described it as "teeth hurting."
It's likely that birthday cake-flavored ice creams just aren't ideal for ice cream rankings since "sweet" can't be the only flavor — none of our taste testers even mentioned vanilla, which means all they experienced were sugary notes. Although sweetness is inherently a quality of ice cream, it can't really be expected to be the main draw. You might think we're just fishing for hot takes, but entire Reddit threads exist to trash the concept, with many declaring that the only draw of birthday cake-flavored anything is just vanilla mixed with attractive yet tasteless sprinkles. We say skip the Baskin-Robbins birthday cake-flavored ice cream and literally get anything else; you're guaranteed to be happier. (If you're craving birthday cake ice cream, take Jason Kelce's advice and go to Cold Stone Creamery instead.)