Visit: Turkey Hill Experience + Taste Lab

This post is dedicated to our old blogging friends who used to (and may still) write for the Ice Cream Journal at Turkey Hill and to Jessie, formerally of Cakespy. (I logged onto Facebook today just before I went to write this post to find out after eleven years she is saying goodbye to Cakespy and hello to Unicorn Love). Thank you, Jessie, for eleven wonderful years of Cakespy and good luck with future endeavors! We have so enjoyed watching your vision grow into the wonderful everything it has become over the years!


❤️+ 🍦 + 🍰, Scoopalicious


It has been almost three years since I have written a post on Scoopalicious. A lot has changed in that time. My daughter is now old enough to actually read this blog. The last time I wrote she was just about to start kindergarten, and now she's mere months away from finishing second grade. My five year old could barely say the word ice cream last time I wrote this blog and being a late walker, she was still scooting on the ground towards the ice cream. With these children came less and less time to blog about ice cream. Tina, Patrick, and I all took to other forms of social media, sometimes posting to Facebook and Instagram.

I recently visited the Ice Cream Journal where our buddies at Turkey Hill used to blog, only to find that they have since moved to a new format, the all encompassing Turkey Hill Nation. Logging in (yes, you now have to login) takes you to more options than I can fit on a page for one screenshot (see below). It seems a little less intimate, which is odd, since logging in should seem to make it more personal.

Anyway, I also somewhere along the way, rediscovered the Turkey Hill Experience (THE). With a spring break trip starting in Philadelphia (hello, Cousin Mandy!) I knew I wanted to make THE a part of our trip. And so we did.

Any visit starts off right with a photo op in front of a super large cow!

We decided to sign up for both the Turkey Hill Experience and the Taste Lab. (We don't write a beverage blog, so we skipped the Tea Experience, but we imagine it would have been fun too, and the cost is minimal...)

The Taste Lab was fun. (Look at all the bottles of flavoring and swirls. Along the walls are the mix-ins! I'd like this at my house!)

It was a mix of a video presentation (where you can learn answers to questions like "What's the most popular flavor of Turkey Hill Ice Cream?" You can either go to the Taste Lab yourself or we can tell you that if Tina were an ice cream flavor at Turkey Hill, she'd be the most popular!) and a guided mix-your-own-ice-cream bar.

While we clearly learned stuff in the video, our focus was clearly in the ice cream mixing. We started with a plain base and then picked out flavoring. Go slowly with the drops, A! You can always add more, but you can't take away if you add too much!

Next it's time to add the swirls.

Finally, it's time for the mix-in. (When you first get your pint of ice cream, it's about 3/4 full, but that's ok! It leaves plenty of room for all the mix-ins!)

And then it's time to eat! YUM!

Then it's off to the Turkey Hill Experience. THE is part science lesson, part hands-on fun, and of course, part taste testing!

Here we are using the machine that

The thread (or white path on the ground, as it were) that tied the whole experience together was using a number specific to your ticket to design a virtual ice cream flavor, package it, and then make a commercial. You could even go back online later find your creation! It's a silly and fun experience, especially when Dad is wearing the same color as a green screen and turns into a floating head!

Tickets to THE experience include all-you-can-eat ice cream. Flavors are limited to eight rotating, but there's something for everyone from ice creams to sherbets to sometimes even new flavors! Here we are loving our Fruit Rainbow Sherbet after a long morning playing and exploring at the Turkey Hill Experience!

Admittedly, I didn't get as many pictures as I should have for you all, so here's a video direct from Turkey Hill...

Next stop, Niagara Falls!