Every year, the warmer months bring with them traditions and activities that make it feel like summer. Along with coastal road trips, bundles of fish and chips shared with friends, and a backyard barbecue or two, summer isn’t summer without an impromptu trip to the shops for an ice cream. Excited by the warming weather, we dove into our local corner shop’s freezer and pulled out one of every ice cream we could carry, pitting the new Drumsticks against the classic Magnums against the Oreo ice cream sandwiches to try to pick the ultimate ice cream of the summer. When the ice cream headaches settled, these were the champions….
Uh oh. First impressions of this kid-targeted, budget-friendly entry weren’t good, the tongue-shaped ice cream covered top to bottom in ice crystals. Once those had been carefully scraped off things were just as disappointing, the icy, slightly crystalised texture of the ice cream and the dull chocolate flavour making all the ice scraping seem like a bit of a waste of time. 3/10
This one seemed doomed before we’d even opened the packet. Surely replacing an Oreo biscuit’s creamy but solid centre with cookies and cream ice cream would make the biscuits all soggy? Yep. That’s what happened. Tasty as the filling between these oversized cookies was, its appeal was muted by the spongy disappointment of what was around it. 4/10
Divided into two halves, the Maxibon features a block of choc chip-dotted vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two chocolate biscuits at one end, and coated with a thin layer of chocolate studded with hazelnut and cookie fragments at the other. The choc-coated end is a masterpiece, the choc chips in the ice cream and the hazelnut and cookies in the coating making each bite a textural, delicious adventure. The cookie end, sadly, suffers the same unfortunate soggy fate as the Oreo ice cream sandwich, bringing down the Maxibon’s score with it. 6.5/10
It’s a hard, sad reality of life that the things we loved as kids often don’t hold up when we try them again as adults. So imagine our surprise when we tore open this wrapper and found an ice cream inside that actually kind-of matched the pic on the front, hole through the cowboy hat and all. And imagine how stunned we were to discover that the chocolate, strawberry and caramel ice creams were actually delicious, backed by a perfect, atom-thin layer of delicate chocolate. Bill’s downfall in this showdown? Still that terrible bubble gum nose. 7/10
Coming for the Magnum crown, Connoisseur’s point of difference is its creative range of flavours. We went for the cookies and cream – there’s no straight-up chocolate option and Connoisseur’s vanilla is only available in packs of four – over inventive flavours like ‘Golden Blondie’, ‘Salted Pretzel’ and ‘Mint & Cookies’. And while we were fans of the taste of the smooth ice cream and the thin chocolate coating, as well as the way the chocolate held together while we ate it (you hear that, Magnum…?), it lost half a point for its aggressive sweetness. 7.5/10
Along with Tim Tams, Four’N Twenty meat pies and Vegemite, the Golden Gaytime isn’t just an Australian food, it’s part of our cultural identity. But is this iconic vanilla ice cream, layered with a toffee ice cream coat and rolled through craggly pebbles of biscuit crumb, any good? It wouldn’t be one of the country’s most popular ice creams if it wasn’t. Only the tendency for the biscuit crumbs to get a bit soggy saw a few points knocked off, but overall, this a sweet treat worthy of its place in the pantheon of Aussie legends. 8/10
From the wisps of white chocolate settled on top of the frozen chocolate sauce tiara to the centimetre of solid milk choc plugged into the foot of the cone, this ice cream gave us almost everything we want in a sweet snack. Smooth and creamy, strong in chocolatey flavour, with only a slightly soggy cone letting things down, the aptly-named Cornetto almost took the title. 8.5/10
Whether you like a sprinkling of almonds, swirls of passionfruit, or a magical chamber of caramel hiding between two layers of chocolate, there’s a Magnum for you. But take things back to their classic ‘chocolate covered vanilla ice cream on a stick’ origins, and the OG Magnum still stacks up as, well, a classic. That chocolate shell might fall to pieces with a bite, but the shards are a pleasure to eat even when rescued from your hands. The ice cream itself was the best of the test, gently vanilla flavoured and gorgeously creamy, with no chemical aftertaste or hint of graininess. 9/10
One of two cone-wrapped ice creams competing for the trophy in this ice cream-off, the Drumstick didn’t just come to play, it came to win. Featuring a slightly lighter, creamier and smoother ice cream than the Cornetto, it was the chocolate sauce lining the border between ice cream and cone and swirling its way down the centre that set it apart. With the same chocolate plug at the foot of the cone as the Cornetto, it was the slightly crispier cone, the sprinkle of nuts across the top, and that magical chocolate sauce that gave the Drumstick the edge and the overall victory. 10/10
