Breaking Off A Piece

Not a bold statement: The defining trait of a Twix bar is the cookie.

There’s chocolate, caramel and/or peanut butter going on there, for sure, but that’s not why you buy a Twix.

You buy a Twix because of the crunch from that sweet-ass cookie.

[Ed. note: Alternatively, you very well buy a Twix because there are two of them because you love to eat things in prime numbers or you are a mother/father of two young children who do NOT need to eat a whole candy bar right now.]

With that basic Twix principle understood, one would think that when developing a Twix ice cream bar, the ice cream bar developers would make sure they nailed the cookie part.

#nope.

The Twix Ice Cream Bar is very similar to the Snickers Ice Cream Bar [Ed. note: ICB will be the preferred term here on out, in the proper sense], with a few key differences:

• The ice cream filling is straight-up vanilla. Not some tan/caramel/gently chocolate facsimile (as featured in Snickers ICB). Polar-bear/first-communion/most-useless-crayon-in-the-box white vanilla.
• In lieu of the peanut, the Twix ICB features small bites of the aforementioned sweet-ass cookie interspersed atop its caramel-sauce layer.
• The Twix ICB is slightly narrower.

Otherwise, though, the bars are the same: thin outer chocolate layer, caramel sauce, made of ice cream.

Those differences, ahem, make all the difference.

Focusing first on the cookie bites, because, duh: Man, do they ever leave you wanting more.

I recognize that the ice cream bar developers probably ran into an ice cream bar development nightmare: How do you maintain the crunch integrity of a cookie inside of an ice cream bar when you’ll be manufacturing said ice cream bar by pouring a somewhat-liquid ice cream substance atop the cookie?

Have you ever poured any other somewhat-liquid substances atop a cookie? Pudding, custard, whipped cream? It soggies that shit up! A soggy cookie in a Twix ice cream bar is far worse evil than not enough cookie, which is why I’m guessing the ice cream bar developers hitched their wagon to the latter.

But let me repeat: Man, do they ever leave you wanting more. There’s just not enough crunch happening here, folks. And when you’re using the Twix brand, you better come hard to the hole when it comes to crunch.

The other differences do bear note to reference as well. When enjoying either an original or a peanut butter Twix, you won’t taste any vanilla because none of the ingredients in a Twix bar have any vanilla in them. Vanilla literally isn’t listed in the list of ingredients. So, when you take your first bite of Twix ICB, it’s a little jarring when that unexpected vanilla hits your tongue. It’s not bad, per se, just not very Twixy.

Also, the narrowness of the bar, I believe, affects the texture of the Twix ICB’s ice cream as well. Because there’s less, um, girth(?) to the Twix ICB versus the Snickers ICB, the Twix’s ice cream gets much more frozen due to the increased surface area relative to the bar’s volume. This means that when you bite into it, there’s a good chance it will, um, cleave (?) apart, as opposed to the creamier bite-from-bar separation that the Snickers ICB affords. It’s a pretty strange phenomenon that I’m almost definitely describing incorrectly, but it’s similar to what happens when you take a bite out of a popsicle, albeit to a lesser degree of cleavage. It’s not such a thing that ruins the bar (and I’d be willing to bet that this effect would dissipate given time for the bar to thaw), but it’s a thing nonetheless.

[Ed. note: There is also a possibility that this cleavage effect is due to the vanilla ice cream vs. whatever flavor it is in the Snickers ICB, but Imma attribute this one to physics.]

At the end of the day (/the end of this blog post), the Twix ICB’s greatest downfall is that of its brand. I know I just spent the better part of 700 words just shitting all over it, but it’s really not a bad dessert at all; I’ve purchased three this summer alone. But by bringing in the connection to Twix, I’m expecting a fking Twix bar with ice cream, and that means a powerhouse cookie crunch. If you packaged this very bar as a portable caramel cookie crumble confection, I’d be pretty excited about it; my only complaint would be the awkward cleave.