Lucas double fisting at Izzy’s

Lucas started eating ice cream a few months ago but took a real liking to it in Japan. Just about any shop in Japan that sells ice cream has a humongous, fake ice cream outside.

Lucas had ice cream radar throughout the trip and his vocabulary started to change. For a while he was calling ice cream “ice” but then it started to become what it is today, “icekeem”!

While looking into things to do in Minnesota I found out that there was really good ice cream around the Twin Cities. I wanted to make sure that Lucas enjoyed the trip so I made a short list of five places to consider visiting (although the odds of visiting all of them in two days was not likely).

In our short visit we ended up visiting 4/5 places or 80%. I’d say Lucas would call that a successful visit to Minnesota! Lucas kept asking for ice cream so we had to give the boy what he asked for. To be honest, we should’ve really visited three places but one of the shops happened to be a few doors down from a toy train store we were stopping in for Lucas so how could we not try it out.

Some of you might think- damn that’s a lot of ice cream to eat in only two days. But don’t you worry, we shared in 3 out of 4 places. The one time we didn’t share Lucas got to have his own ice cream for the first time. It might be hard to tell from the photo above, but the cone was not much bigger than a thimble. I had the same size as Lucas and Kim had the next size up which was also pretty small.

Pumphouse Creamery Sampler

Pumphouse Creamery has lots of interesting flavors on the menu. We were told the flavors are created based on what is available locally. After trying out a few flavors, we decided to order the mini-sampler which comes with 5 small scoops. The ice cream scooper was nice enough to offer us a 6th scoop! My favorite flavor was Sea salt, homemade caramel, praline pecans and Kim really liked Chocolate, banana, homemade brownies.

Sebastian Joe’s

Sebastian Joe’s was our favorite shop that we visited. When we arrived it didn’t look busy but then we noticed how the line went all of the way down the length of the shop. We considered leaving but figured it was worth the wait since the line was so long. The line moved fast and we chatted with a local couple which made the time move quicker.

After tasting a few flavors we went with one of the special flavors of the day. I’m not sure what the flavor was called but it was incredible. It was a chocolate ice cream with chocolate pieces and some other things inside. I’m not doing the flavor justice with that description but it was really great. Our second flavor was salty caramel which was also very good.

Grand Ole Creamery

The first thing we noticed when we went into Grand Ole Creamery were the homemade cones being made. Again we had some samples which were very much hit or miss. We went with Butter Brickle which wasn’t the best choice. As a sample, the flavor is great but a whole serving was too sweet. This flavor is buttery and sweet with little candy pieces in it. It reminded me of Linden’s Butter Crunch cookies just a whole lot sweeter. The best part about the ice cream was the homemade cone.

I’m not saying that Grand Ole Creamery doesn’t make good ice cream, we probably just ordered the wrong flavor.

Cone options at Izzy’s

Izzy’s was a close second for our favorite ice cream shop. Like Grand Ole, they also make homemade cones but the thing that stood out was all of the cone options. They had some good ice cream flavors too. Since they had really tiny cones (Izzy), we had to get Lucas his own ice cream for the first time. We ordered Lucas chocolate and I had salted caramel in the same size as him. Kim had a coffee flavor in the cake cone which is one size up.

Lucas loved my salted caramel and eventually took it from me (see the photo at the top of the post). He is also very good with sharing and offered me tastes of his. I felt that plain chocolate was the best flavor that I tried at Izzy’s.

If you decide to visit the Twin Cities you can’t really go wrong having ice cream at any of these shops. Or decide for yourself which is best and go to all four!