Why You Should Avoid Buying This Celebratory Halo Top Ice Cream Flavor

Birthday cake is one of the most polarizing ice cream flavors, but what constitutes a birthday cake has come a long way from its ancient Roman origins. Taking the elements you'd see on the proverbial dessert — white cake base, sprinkles, buttercream frosting — the ice cream is usually a much sweeter version of vanilla. Whether you're a fan of this flavor or not, there's one brand we won't want to party with for its less-than-celebratory taste.

In our ranking of 14 Halo Top ice cream flavors, the birthday cake pint placed last. Upon the first bite, our writer described it as "a weird, artificial taste" akin to Play-Doh. It lacked the semblance of a real birthday cake and didn't have enough sprinkles to make up for it. And sadly, the sprinkles were the best part. The ingredient list for the birthday cake ice cream is similar to the vanilla bean, which ranked a couple of notches higher on the list at 11th place. Regardless of how you feel about the ice cream brand, it seems Halo Top dropped the ball on this one.

Halo Top birthday cake ice cream contains many of the same ingredients as the ice cream that made the top of our list: sea salt caramel. Halo Top is committed to bringing low-calorie, high-protein desserts that cater to the health and fitness crowd, so its ice creams have some standout differences; like using stevia leaf as a sweetener and swapping whole milk for skim. 

Cutting out cane sugar to add in low-cal sweeteners like stevia and erythritol (sugar alcohol) can easily create an "artificial" taste and that's definitely the case here. Halo Top's birthday cake lacks distinct flavors (unlike the blueberry crumble and mint chip varieties) which might otherwise mask these sweeteners. Basically, the less pleasant ingredients are more noticeable here.

Low-fat ice cream tends to be chalkier than standard ice cream, but several of the Halo Top scoops in our ranking had a wonderful, creamy consistency. That said, the birthday cake ice cream's mouthfeel was grainy. Why that might be, we don't know, but this is one store-bought ice cream you can leave out of the shopping cart.