Love is like a Heath Wave

When I wrote about getting the name of my newspaper into Steve Harvey's L.A. Times column 82 times, I joked that I really ought to get some kind of kickback from the Bulletin's marketing department.

This prompted our marketing department to give me a $15 gift card from Cold Stone Creamery with a note reading: "Here's your kickback." Hey, I'll take what I can get.

Frankly, I'm not a fan of Cold Stone, Marble Slab and the like where they pull taffy-like ice cream out of a bin, toss it on a slab, add the "mix-ins" of your choice (Cap'n Crunch, M&M's, etc.) and massage the whole mass with paddles. I like my ice cream straight.

However, I'd recently read in our paper (story no longer available online) and in the Courier about a Claremont High junior, Loraine Ong, who created a Cold Stone flavor for the Claremont location as part of a national contest.

Heath Wave, as it's called, has French vanilla ice cream, Heath bars, a brownie and chocolate sauce. That sounded worth trying.

So on Monday after dinner I used $5.59 of my $15 to get a dish at the store, 101 N. Indian Hill Blvd. in the Village Expansion. Heath Wave isn't on the menu -- and the official promotion recently ended -- but the scooper knew what it was and how to make it. The result was quite tasty.

Or as Ong described her flavor to the Courier: "It's smooth, crunchy and chewy."

Mmmm...smooth, crunchy and chewy.

It was no Elvis Special, the peanut butter and banana flavor at Bert and Rocky's, but what is? If Heath Wave sounds like something you'd like, go for it. And raise a spoon to Loraine Ong. I raised one for our marketing department, too, but that's just me.