Written by Aidan Broome
I do not own a TikTok account. At least not anymore. I am out of the loop on all the trendy audios and inside jokes and memes and such. Often when I am shown a TikTok, it is not funny to me because I am disconnected from the subtle contours of the app’s ever-changing humor. Largely, I would say I look at the app disapprovingly. But not today. Today TikTok has done the world a favor.
One of my primary sources of TikTok intake is my older sister. She keeps me up to date with celebrity drama, popular Netflix shows and trends of all kinds, and sometimes she’ll send a TikTok to watch. She called me this past Monday while I was working in the library. Not wanting to distract those around me, I went down to the phone booth on the bottom floor to answer the call.
“Hey, if I Venmo you $10 will you do something with me?” she said as soon as I picked up the phone. Of course, I’ll never turn down a good $10, so I inquired what she wanted me to do. She informed me of one of the latest TikTok trends, a food combination that she held in skepticism: ice cream and Fruit Roll-Up.
The recipe is quite simple: a small scoop of ice cream placed in the center of a Fruit Roll-Up. The Fruit Roll-Up is then wrapped around the scoop of ice cream, perhaps like a burrito, bao or ravioli. The ice cream freezes and hardens the Fruit Roll-Up, and what follows is a fruity, gummy dessert which is apparently causing mukbang TikTokers to go into a frenzy.
My sister, ever skeptically curious of internet trends, couldn’t tell if these mukbangers were faking their elation. Perhaps less adventurous than I, she needed someone she trusted to test this new trend before she would. So she sent me the $10 for me to go to the store, buy myself a pint of ice cream and a box of Fruit Roll-Ups, and as the kids say, “Go ham.” I myself am a big fan of ice cream, gummy candy and strange food combinations, so to get all these things for free was an easy choice.
After my girlfriend and I acquired the goods, we sat in the Ganus Activities Complex parking lot on FaceTime with my sister, and the three of us tried this odd combination. My review: 11/10.
You don’t expect it, but the freezing ice cream turns the Fruit Roll-Up’s texture into something like the perfect Chili’s tortilla chip. It crunches in your teeth with the most satisfying shatter one could imagine. But after the first crunch, the frozen Roll-Up melts and returns to the classic gummy texture we all know and love. You get one solid bit of crunch and then you chew as the grinded gummy produces a sweet artificial fruit flavor that somehow creates perfect harmony with the vanilla ice cream. The experience is both nostalgic and renewing. Ice cream and Fruit Roll-Ups were a staple of my childhood, and each alone could be considered perfect. But together, the two create a rare super-perfection of food rivaling, if not outright dethroning, the classic ice cream sandwich for the best dessert food of all time.
I don’t like TikTok, but for this I will say, “Thank you.” You’ve changed the dessert game forever.
