A Milkshake

Here's a fun thought activity you can try at home. You are trying to find ingredients to make a quick and easy vegan dessert to satisfy your sweet tooth on a sweltering day. Brainstorm the five worst grocery stores where you could attempt this task. Take five to ten minutes and report back.

Back? If 'a Wal-Mart in Topeka, KS' was not on your list, please repeat the exercise.

You know you've acclimated to your privileged, blue state life when you are genuinely surprised upon failing to find at least two shelves of vegan ice cream in the ice cream section of a grocery store. Today's selection at the Wal-Mart on Wanamaker consisted of exactly one choice: Vanilla ice cream made with coconut milk.

I guess I can understand why some people think that vanilla is an acceptable flavor for a dessert. If I'm given a dessert that isn't chocolate, I can make do. For lunch today my mom made some baked apples and they were really good. On rare occasions, I might even choose a non-chocolate dessert when a chocolate dessert is available. But if I'm being honest, dessert begins and ends with chocolate for me. So, the vanilla was a set-back.

I decided that I could salvage this vanilla business with some dark chocolate to sprinkle over the ice cream. As it turns out, the luxury chocolate selection at this particular location was a bit slim as well. I'm not a connoisseur at all; I usually just get a Chocolove Almonds and Sea Salt bar every week or two and call it good. What I got tonight tasted pretty good in my unrefined opinion. Both bars were from Chuao. I got one Caracas bar, which has a few different kinds of nuts in dark chocolate. The other was a Panko bar, which has panko bread crumbs and sea salt in dark chocolate.

By the time I got home with the ice cream I had decided to make a milkshake. My friend and fellow CU philosopher, Dan Lowe, is a vegan milkshake ambassador. He inspired me to make a shake back in Boulder a couple of weeks ago. I had some chocolate soy ice cream in my freezer that was growing some interesting freezer fuzz, so I threw it in a blender with some almond milk and the results were perfect, which is to say very creamy and very chocolate-y.

Here's what I used tonight:

A few scoops of vanilla bean ice cream (almost the whole tiny carton)

A cup-ish of unsweetened almond milk

A tablespoon or so of cocoa powder

About 1/4 of a chocolate bar, crunched up

Blend it up and drink it. It's not rocket science.

Frankly, this shake was not my favorite. If I had it to do over, I'd probably just leave the chocolate bar and cocoa powder out. It had the color of a chocolate shake, but the vanilla flavor of the ice cream was the only thing I could taste. It was like a cruel joke every time I took a sip and discovered that I was not drinking a chocolate shake. However, if I liked vanilla more, I think it would have been great. The chocolate chunks were a mistake because they just clogged the straw and I wasted some good chocolate because I couldn't get all the chunks out. The shake might have benefitted from the addition of some fruit to cut the richness of the vanilla. Raspberries sound about right.

The panko bar deserves its own special plug. I'm a sucker for sea salt with dark chocolate (who isn't?), so this was right in my wheelhouse. The panko breadcrumbs made the bar light and crispy, like a Nestle Crunch bar if Nestle Crunch bars tasted good.

Finally, let me say something in defense of Topeka. I could have gone other places and found what I wanted (chocolate vegan ice cream). The new Hy-Vee is great. Akin's is the classic place for this kind of stuff. Even the fancy Dillons would have been better than Wal-Mart. But, my parents wanted to stop there to buy cookie dough and I didn't want to be left out of the dessert party so I did what I could.

Go forth and shake!