In the pantheon of ice cream flavors, strawberry is undoubtedly the red-headed step-child. Who out there hasn't opened a carton of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry Neopolitan ice cream and not been confronted with an abundance of strawberry remaining while the other two flavors barely coat the bottom of the cardboard? It is an ice cream travesty that sooner or later will come to a halt, but not until strawberry gets the royal treatment. Ice engineers, what are you waiting for!?

It is with much fanfare that strawberry gets a face lift with Ben & Jerry's latest concoction: Strawberry Cheesecake. The variety is a noble effort that succeeds greatly on one hand yet falls short on the other (sadly, this is the strawberry ice cream front).

The strawberry cheesecake ice cream base in B & J's Strawberry Cheesecake is decent, very smooth but also a bit milky. Tasting more cheesy than fruity this is a case where B & J should have upped the amount of real berries sprinkled throughout the ice cream and combated the sinister milky cheese taste head on. But alas, the taste grows less appetizing the more one's spoon digs through the flavor.

The Jeckyl to Strawberry Cheesecake's Hyde, however, is the scrumptious graham cracker swirl. So good is this swirl that it raises a fairly average ice cream to very acceptable heights.

In concocting rings of glorious taste sensations and spreading them around their various ice cream flavors, Ben and Jerry have figured out that the best way to keep the masses coming back to their over-priced pints is with various submerged toppings. This way, even if the ice cream base flavor fails, you can still win the day with a cookie/candy swirl that can easily turn an average flavor into ice cream gold, precisely what happens with this one.

The graham cracker swirl in Strawberry Cheesecak is truly spectacular and an unquestionable B & J triumph. Even though the strawberry cheesecake ice cream falls a little short, the concoction as a whole nevertheless obtains my stamp of approval. So try it at your next TV movie night; you never know, that swirl just my steal your heart.