Magnum Force

As with Magnum Force, the movie, Magnum Ice Cream is another force to be reckoned with, and once tried, you will not be forced to take a second bite. They can be found in food shops, markets, and refrigerator cases all over Western Europe. If you can't find them at home, my travel tip is to try them during your vacation.

With all the ice cream shops and gelaterie in Europe, who could imagine settling for an ice cream novelty product? All across Western Europe you can find Magnum products and wouldn't consider it "settling" if you bought one. They're delicious and are now giving Dove bars a run for their money in the U.S. Perhaps that is why they seem smaller in size here, to compete also in size with the Dove bar, so the comparison will be inevitable between the two

The classic is the closest in comparison with the Dove bar, but the chocolate tastes richer and the vanilla ice cream itself compares well with Dove. The Almond also takes its cue from Dove's Milk chocolate and Almond bar. Which came first is a mystery to me.

The superiority of the Magnum seems obvious with the Double Chocolate or Double Caramel bars, with their duel layers of hardened chocolate encasing the soft chocolate, caramel  filling or the buttery, caramel filling.

The Magnum line is extensive in Europe, but imports to the U.S. have not kept pace.

A pale pink chocolate shell surrounds the raspberry and vanilla swirl ice cream on the Pink bar, while the Gold Bar is swirled with caramel.

The Gold is covered by a  thin, buttery looking,  white chocolate shell. Besides the rich tasting vanilla ice cream with a caramel swirl, the Gold bar also has a layer of dark chocolate on the inside of its shell. The taste of both bars is enhanced by the interior, dark chocolate layer.

The White is pretty much just that, white. Plain vanilla at its very best.

Pistacchio helps round out the line in terms of ice cream flavors, but, sorry to say, this is not their best product. It is hard to top an artisan made pistacchio gelato, and the nuts don't improve the concept of this particular bar.

For the last item in this post, you see before you the Magnum Sandwich, a not  quite clear on the concept, ice cream novelty. Sure, the Almond Magnums are good, but they do not belong piggy backed onto an ice cream sandwich like an odd appendage. San Francisco's native ice cream sandwich, the It's-It   made it better decades ago, by simply covering the entire sandwich with chocolate. This version makes the sandwich half look like a mechanism for holding an Almond Magnum that had lost its stick.