Every Insomnia Ice Cream Flavor, Ranked Worst To Best
Insomnia Cookies is known as the answer for after-dark cravings for gooey cookies, decadent ice cream, or a combination cookie'wich. While these treats are available year-round, summer is the perfect time to celebrate National Ice Cream Day thanks to Insomnia's rollout of its first ice cream line, Cookies IN Ice Cream — taking the idea of cookie meets cream to the next level. The beloved late-night cookie-delivery company merged its famous baked goods with signature ice cream flavors for some cosmically themed taste combinations in time for the national pseudo-holiday.
So, which flavor should you get? We've tried all of Insomnia's ice cream flavors to give you the scoop — and these are our picks from least desirable to most ice screamable. One tip based on all our testing: Avoid getting Insomnia ice cream delivered, as this is a quality treat that will start melting immediately upon exiting the freezer. But, if you're up late (or, just want ice cream for lunch), then Insomnia is a great place to grab a cone when it's hot.
8. Chocolate
Wait, chocolate at the bottom of a ranked list of ice cream flavors? The universal constant of ice cream is that nobody puts chocolate in a corner. What madness transpires here? Yes, it's true, the chocolate ice cream at Insomnia is good, because ... y'know, it's chocolate ice cream. But, this version wasn't a wow. Chocolate's natural advantage was canceled out by the lack of fun fillings that most of these other flavors offer.
So, why did we place chocolate last? It almost seems to be a victim of its own desire to taste gourmet. A pleasant cocoa bitterness jostles this out of the overly sweet chocolate standard, but it never comes together with the creaminess to completely work. A flavor that feels like it's striving to make a dark chocolate bar into ice cream somehow tastes closer to baking cocoa. The end result is a mildly alkali chocolate that satisfies — at the bare minimum. You can't call it lazy. It's even commendable for trying to stand out. All the same, a miss is a miss.
7. Dreamweaver
Right on chocolate's heels comes another baffling ice cream flavor. Dreamweaver stuffs double-chocolate chunk cookies into a purple (!) s'more ice cream, then power-loads it with milk fudge swirls and white stars. You would be completely reasonable to expect this wild ride to touch down in the top spot, but oddly, something about it never comes together.
Maybe the disappoint stems from how visually, the purple ice cream makes it difficult not to expect a Tillamook Purple Cow-style berry and chocolate chunk flavor, resulting in a muted marshmallow presence. Maybe, it's that this Insomnia ice cream melts too fast in the mouth for the frozen mix-ins to keep up. Or maybe, it's that the marshmallow taste of the base really never established itself. Let's be honest, marshmallow without texture is just vanilla by another name. All we can tell you is that Insomnia's Dreamweaver Cookies IN Ice Cream is one of the prettiest scoop to look at, and it may be a crowd-pleaser to kids for its kitchen-sink variety. Adults will probably find happiness eating a different selection. We did.
6. Minterstellar
Whereas Dreamweaver was a packed stage of jazziness, Minterstellar pleases with its mellow mint base and crumbs speckled throughout before erupting into lodes of double chocolate mint cookies. It's more or less what a mint-chocolate serving of dairy deliciousness ought to be. You have to respect the brand for foregoing food coloring — even though green would look great sandwiched between a couple dark chocolate cookies. We're dealing in realities, not what-ifs here, people. When the cookies go in the ice cream, the ice cream has nothing to prove.
Anyone who likes mint is going to want to order this exemplary iteration, but it's also not going to change any minds. We found it delivers on the concept, and that is all you can want from flavors you already know you like. The cookies do stutter-step expectations a bit: We thought we were biting into a chocolate chip, only to have it turn out to be cookie, and then found a chocolate chip. If it were possible to taste the cookies and the ice cream together more, we might move Minterstellar up a spot, but like Dreamweaver, this Insomnia ice cream suffers a bit of a ratio problem.
5. Vanilla
Folks, this is wild. We might naturally gravitate towards mint-chocolate ice cream, and yet, here it is scooped (Yes! Pun intended!) by plain ol' vanilla. And it's not even golden vanilla or French vanilla, this is just a quality serving of old-fashioned vanilla done right. This is the vanilla that proves basic flavors can be great — and even the most basic version of basic, at that. Insomnia's vanilla ice cream might prove that the cookie belongs on the outside of the ice cream. The frozen part of the formula is already great. Or, maybe, its formula is boosted by using a vanilla pudding angle like the Cookies IN Cream flavor on our ranking.
Whatever the answer, we recommend you grab this vanilla. It's worth going low-key. Plus, when you order this flavor, your server may subconsciously give you a little extra to make up for the lack of exciting additions. Let them do it! You could do a lot worse than to pick this flavor for plunking into your root beer float.
4. Cookies 'N Dream
Here we arrive at the tightest ranking in the competition. Cookies 'N Dream is straightforward and classic: double-chocolate chunk cookies reside within vanilla pudding-flavored ice cream. It's a splendid cookies-and-cream flavor that avoids mere repetition of the overdone Oreo ice cream template, while still employing its best features. And in fact, Cookies 'N Dream would probably hold a higher spot if not for competitors taking this ice cream's best feature and applying it to a winning formula.
Still, this is a great Insomnia ice cream flavor that's really the embodiment of the entire line. The hunks of chocolate and smooth vanilla are a great combination. The cookie texture is well-balanced with the ice creaminess, and Insomnia doesn't overcomplicate things with too many add-ins. It ought to be the flagship for the entire line.
But, in another way, it's even more fitting that Cookies 'N Dream lands smack in the middle of the list. You get something with all the requirements for broad appeal, even if it lacks an outlying feature that would polarize fandom. In this case, broad appeal is commendable.
3. Moon Tracks
So, you've probably spotted Moose Tracks from your local, favorite ice cream brand, and then seen it again from a completely different brand. You might have asked yourself, "what's up with that?" Well, it turns out Moose Tracks is the creation of Denali Flavors, a husband-and-wife team that licenses those branded chocolate-cup mix-ins to individual ice cream makers. This licensing is how the same cartoon moose ends up on a carton of Hood Ice Cream and Turkey Hill Dairy.
Is that what's happening inside Insomnia's Moon Tracks ice cream? We can't be sure since the label for this flavor is lacking an image of America's second-greatest cartoon moose. (Sorry, Denali, but we ride or die with Bullwinkle.) What moves Insomnia's Moon Tracks to the next level is the use of vanilla-pudding ice cream for a silkier texture. So, you've got the beloved chocolate peanut butter cups with the unmatchable, melting grit of those ribbons of fudge, and an upgrade to the base flavor.
This is definitely one of the best iterations (or a just-this-side-of-a-lawsuit clone) of the Moose Tracks license we've ever encountered. The internet is mum on details, but we're more than happy to eat as many cups of Insomnia's Moon Tracks as it takes to decide for ourselves.
2. Cookie D'ough
First off: props to Insomnia for resisting the urge to make its Cookie D'ough with a chocolate base. You're extra, and we dig that — even if we have to wonder for the rest of our lives if cookies would have catapulted Insomnia's plain chocolate to the top of this ranking by adding juuuuust enough sugar and contrast to that cocoa powder taste. But, we will never know.
Second, why is there an apostrophe in this non-"Simpsons"-themed nighttime flavor? Like the cosmos itself, Insomnia's ice cream contains countless mysteries never to be solved. What we do know is that the cookie dough-flavored ice cream makes great use of chocolate cookie dough pieces and chocolate chunks, while also adding baked hunks of Insomnia Cookies' signature finished product. You can taste the difference of combining the two best parts of baking cookies yourself into the ice cream. And if you go into one of the late-night locations to buy this flavor, you could also score another perk without the hassle of homemade: the smell of baking cookies.
Insomnia's Cookie D'ough isn't a licking ice cream. It rewards big bites to enjoy its textural symphony all at once. Roll it around your tongue for a moment, before mashing, to savor the full experience. Chocolate chunk is absolutely the flavor we want to pick if headed for a larger serving, because it will go fast otherwise.
1. Caramellionaire
Well, it seems Insomnia Cookies may have abandoned the cosmic naming scheme for this ice cream flavor. Nevertheless! As the cones and bowls mounted, we asked the Insomniac scooping our servings (Are they called Insomniacs? It feels like they should be!) about her favorite flavor, she recommended Caramellionaire without hesitation. After blazing through flavors, we have to agree.
Without knowing any of the flavors at play, one of our taste-testers immediately identified Caramellionaire as not only caramel, but salted caramel. It's no easy feat to bring that aspect through in ice cream, which is abundant in both salt and sugar. Salted caramel cookies, in salted caramel-flavored ice cream, paired with caramel swirls, sounds like it might be death by sweetness. The opposite couldn't be more true. Insomnia sticks the landing with an Olympic gymnast's grace: light, accurate, and impressive.
Combined with the fact that, really, everybody loves caramel — even if peanut butter or mint inspire greater love/hate passions — and we found an all-around winner. You can't go wrong when it goes this right, and Caramellionaire will likely satisfy an entire group in one single flavor.