25 classic ice cream truck treats you probably forgot about

Every baseball-loving kid probably tried this Good Humor treat at some point. However, eating a Bubble Play is more difficult than turning an actual double play. You see, the Bubble Play is a cherry-flavored, mitt-shaped ice pop with a bubble gum baseball stuck to the center. Although common sense would dictate that you eat the baseball first before it falls off, then you’re stuck chewing gum while also trying to eat a giant popsicle. If you try to consume the popsicle first - as many kids have attempted – you’ll inevitably end up dropping the ball and committing an error. The best solution? Pop off the gum and place it on a napkin until you’re finished with the rest.

When we were kids, the Candy Center Crunch was one of our go-to orders from the ice cream truck. It’s essentially a vanilla ice cream bar covered in a Nestle Crunch-like chocolate shell, but in the very middle was a large, solid bar of chocolate. The Candy Center Crunch was especially enjoyable if you could avoid biting or breaking the chocolate bar before you finished eating all the ice cream.

Chipwiches – chocolate chip cookies sandwiching a heaping serving of vanilla ice cream – are deceiving. They always seem like an obvious upgrade over the traditional ice cream sandwich (more on that later), but something was always off. The cookies were too soggy, the ice cream was too hard, and/or all the chocolate chips fell off before you could even take it out of the bag. If you ever encountered a perfect chipwich, you were a lucky, lucky child.

Just when you thought tacos couldn’t get better, Klondike introduced the Choco Taco. Vanilla ice cream with a chocolate swirl housed in a taco-shaped waffle cone that’s covered in chocolate and peanuts is better than meat, cheese, and veggies any day. Plus, it’s often less messy than eating an actual taco... as long as you’re quick!

I don’t think any of my childhood friends even knew what an eclair was, but that didn’t stop plenty of them from ordering Good Humor Chocolate Eclair bars. After all, there really isn’t much that’s eclair-like about them. The dessert is basically just chocolate ice cream surrounded by vanilla ice cream surrounded by more chocolate ice cream and covered in little “cake” pieces.

Bubble gum and cotton candy are both fine foods, but anything flavored like bubble gum or cotton candy always ends up tasting pretty nasty... and Popsicle’s Bubble Gum Swirl and Cotton Candy Swirl pops are no exception. Whoever thought up these “treats” deserves to be locked in solitary confinement and fed nothing but these gnarly popsicles for the rest of their life. We know that might sound harsh, but when it comes to dessert, we don’t mess around.

Not everyone is a big fan of orange and ice cream together, but Creamsicles have been an ice cream truck staple for as long as we can remember. In fact, they got so popular that Popsicle spun off Creamsicle into its own brand, and later released versions that substitute raspberry, blue raspberry, lime, grape, cherry, and blueberry for the classic orange.

If the Candy Center Crunch seemed like choco-overload, you could always opt for the Crunch bar instead. It’s basically the exact same thing, except it doesn’t have the bonus chocolate bar in the middle, and it’s made by Nestle.

Nestle markets its Drumsticks as “The Original Sundae Cone,” and it’s hard to argue with that. These treats seem like they’ve been around since the beginning of time, and they really do combine the most important sundae ingredients – vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and nuts – into one easy-to-eat cone. Just don’t try to actually drum with them. Trust us.

Come Fourth of July each year, you gotta believe there was a drastic uptick in the amount of Popsicle Firecrackers sold. The red-white-and-blue ice pops were ubiquitous around Independence Day, as the imagery was patriotic, and the cherry, white lemon, and blue raspberry flavors together on one pop offered a little something for everyone. Of course, there was always that sneaky friend who would try to eat just the red and blue parts while leaving the white (because we all know lemon was the weakest of the three), even though this would inevitably end with popsicle pieces falling to the ground.

Originally called a “Fudgicle” in the first half of the 20th century, “Fudgsicles” soon became one of Popsicle’s best-selling products, and, like Creamsicles, eventually spun off into their own brand. In addition to the classic milk chocolate version, there are now 100-calorie, low fat, no sugar added, and sugar-free bars, as well as white and dark chocolate flavors.

With all the Crunch bars and Candy Center Crunches out there (not to mention the relatively recent arrival of Magnum bars), it’s easy to forget that vanilla ice cream bars covered in chocolate coatings have been around since the days when our parents were kids. They still exist today and are made by a number of companies, most of whom have figured out that a rounder, oar-shaped stick makes the treat much easier to hold.

Nothing fancy here, just your run-of-the-mill classic sandwich with vanilla ice cream (or sometimes Neapolitan) between two rectangular chocolate wafer cookies that will inevitably stick to your fingertips. Numerous companies made and still make them, and it really doesn’t matter which one you pick. The important part is how you eat the sandwich, and you’ll know this if you’ve ever seen someone unwrap one and simply bite into it. Didn’t anyone teach them that they have to lick the ice cream on each of the four edges first?

The King Cone is kind of like Good Humor’s version of Nestle’s Drumstick, with the big difference being that it’s slightly less messy. In addition to not being covered in as much chocolate and chopped nuts, you can also peel back the paper wrapper as you eat it, instead of needing to remove the whole thing at the beginning.

What would you do for a Klondike Bar? Probably just pay a couple bucks. It’s just ice cream, after all. Personally, we love Klondike bars, especially now that they have numerous varieties like Mint Chocolate Chip, Caramel Pretzel, Reese’s and Heath. The only drawback is that you have to hold onto the actual bar while eating it, meaning it will melt a bit faster than stick-based frozen treats. At least the foil wrapper helps a bit with that issue.

I distinctly remember when Popsicle released their Lick-A-Color pops and how much they changed everything. No longer did kids need to commit to a single flavor, as they could now have popsicles that start out blue, and then turned yellow, red, orange, and green - but not necessarily in that order - as they ate through each layer. In retrospect, they’re kind of like frozen Gobstoppers!

Nowadays it seems like every cartoon character has his or her face on an ice pop, but back in the day, Tweety and Bugs Bunny were among the few options available. We can’t complain about the flavors, as we ate our fair share of Looney Tunes pops in our day, but the appearance never seemed to match the packaging. The bubble gum balls didn’t stay on Tweety or Bugs’ eyes where they were supposed to, and more often than not we ended up with a cross-eyed bunny or a one-eyed bird.

Aside from Tweety and Bugs, there were only one or two other fruit ice pop character options (both of which also had bubble gum eyes), and the Pink Panther was surprisingly one of them. Surprising if only because we don’t recall the Panther being that popular among kids back then. Then again, the first Pink Panther film was released all the way back in 1963 and the most-recent came out in 2009, so maybe it shouldn’t be all that shocking.

These pushable sorbet treats were tasty, but they didn’t call them “Push-Ups” for nothing; they often required a lot of work, especially when the container malfunctioned. Once that simple push-up mechanism was compromised, you’d have no choice but to crush the cardboard tube, tilt back your head, and squeeze the sorbet directly into your mouth. There were numerous companies who replicated this product, but everyone knew the Flintstone version was the best. They even contained vitamin C, making them like a frozen version of Flintstone chewable vitamins.

Remember when we discussed the Bubble Play? The Screwball is similar, except someone finally solved the gum issue. With a Screwball, you can’t access the bubble gum until you fully consume the cherry slushed ice, because the ball is at the very bottom of the cone-shaped container. Problem solved! There’s apparently also a two-ball Screwball available, but that just seems screwy to us.

The Snickers Ice Cream Bar was a summertime solution for candy bar lovers. No longer would they have to deal with melted chocolate in the warmer months, as these bars could thankfully keep themselves cold... as long as you didn’t eat them too slowly. And not only did we regularly chow down on Snickers Ice Cream Bars in our youth just like the kid in this photo, we’re pretty sure we owned those exact same sunglasses - and the bracelet too!

If you could only eat one chocolate-and-vanilla-flavored ice pop shaped like a cartoon character’s head, it had to be Snoopy. Sure, the ratio of chocolate to vanilla was a bit too skewed toward the latter, but that only made gnawing on Snoopy’s ears, nose, eyes, and smile all the more enjoyable.

I’m not going to sugar-coat it (pun not intended), Popsicle-brand Snow Cones ruined snow cones for us in our childhood. Instead of being a cone filled with lightly packed bits of shaved ice, as it’s supposed to be, the frozen treat always started as one solid block of tri-colored ice. You couldn’t bite into it, licking it did very little, and thus you would have to wait until the giant mass slowly melted. There was one upside to Popsicle’s Snow Cones, however: the purple-colored melted ice at the bottom always tasted great.

If you’re the kind of person who calls dibs on the strawberry row of Neapolitan ice cream, you probably also enjoyed the occasional Strawberry Shortcake pop. It was often the best way to get strawberry ice cream from the truck, and it was relatively mess-free. Just make sure not to drip too much of the “signature cake coating” pieces all over the place.

Some kids preferred Strawberry Shortcake, some preferred Chocolate Eclair... but no one ever ordered the third variety, Toasted Almond. Maybe some parents have tried one when ordering with their kids, but as far us children were concerned, it might as well have been a vegetable bar.