#ThirstyThursday: Xiaomei Brown Sugar Boba Ice Cream: Like McDonald’s Soft Serve With Mochi

Alright, peeps. It’s time to inject some reality into the brown sugar boba hype.

But GoodyFeed, Brown Sugar isn’t just Sugar with the brown word added in front! You think they just add some brown stuff inside and then they become brown sugar meh?

Sorry to pop your boba here, but Brown Sugar is actually just sugar mixed with brown. By brown, I mean molasses. That’s right, molasses which you can buy from Cold Storage for about six bucks a bottle.

Don’t believe me? Check Wikipedia.

Or a recipe for brown sugar.

Or this guy, who references the Sugar Association:

And milk tea always had sugar in it. Bubble tea always had boba. So literally the only difference that made horrors like this possible:

Was molasses.

Now that you know all the secrets to the brown sugar hype, it’s enough bitching about molasses and time to review a product that’s born from the hype:

Xiaomei Brown Sugar Boba Ice Cream

We got it at $10.90 a box, with 4 pops inside. But you’d already have known of this product if you were reading GoodyFeed and have Instagram. Yep, it’s the very same one that got sold out quickly when they were launched, and the very same one that went viral even in America.

On the surface, the ice cream doesn’t look too bad. Oh, you noticed the slightly melted portion on top? Don’t mind that. Our fridge is occupied by a hobo, so we don’t really have many options for refrigeration.

Fun fact: this meant that I ate ice cream for breakfast.

The other side:

Taste Test

I then took a lick on the top of the bar, and there’s the pearl. This is just one of many in the bar.

It’s actually pretty easy to imagine the taste here. Take McDonald’s soft serve. Add some brown sugar syrup, but less sweet because it’s frozen. Add some mochi. That’s the taste of this bar right here.

You heard me right here. It’s mochi. But I have to say that this is pretty genius since it manages to successfully replicate the chewy bouncy texture.

Take a gander at the ingredients list if ya don’t believe me:

Snow Rice Cake Mini Mochi-Brown Sugar. 

The milky ice cream base works just fine here. It’s a pretty standard soft serve with nothing much to complain about.

Except brown sugar isn’t very strong, or at least as molassy as you would expect from drinking brown sugar boba milk.

I think the reason why is simply because the “syrup” is frozen, which makes it taste less diluted when it is actually not.

Overall, it works. The ice cream bar is sweet and delicious, managing to replicate the taste of brown sugar boba milk (no tea) pretty successfully.

But as I said, it’s like a McDonald’s soft serve. Which means that the price is definitely jacked up because of hype.

Rating: 3/5 

If this were, say, priced the same as Meiji ice cream bars (box of 4 for $7.50), the rating would be a solid 4/5. That’s a hype-tax of a few bucks there.

And nutrition info if you need it for whatever reason: