Month: July 2014

Most thieves steal money, jewels, or cars, but a knife-wielding thug in Adelaide, Australia, is interested in a far less valuable commodity: Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Since the city’s first Krispy Kreme opened on July 4, there’s been a line out the door from Australians ready to trade their Vegemite for glazed doughnuts.

But what was a sweet event for pastry lovers was tinged with a sour note July 16 when two teenagers were robbed of six boxes of doughnuts.

The teen victims told police they were getting in their car when a man approached them and threatened them with a knife.

He then demanded the pair stay in the car while he grabbed the glazed goodies from the back seat and high-tailed it out of there, Adelaide Now reports.

The doughnut thief was described as a Caucasian aged 16 to 20, about 5-feet, 4 inches, wearing a black hooded jumper and black track pants, according to the Australian.

One of the victims, a 17-year-old boy who asked not to be identified, is still surprised by the theft.

“It’s pretty bad, like you think he’d like take the money or something, but he took the doughnuts,” he told Yahoo! Australia.

Store manager Mark Higginbottom believes the robbery was an isolated incident, but is beefing up security just in case.

Although he has promised to replace the stolen doughnuts, the boys say they are too frightened to revisit the store.

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BREAKING! July is National Ice Cream Month! Whether you like chocolate or vanilla, you’d rather enjoy a cone versus a sundaes, or you prefer sprinkles or hot fudge (or both!), treating yourself to a dip of this sweet treat is always a good idea. Lately, ice cream has gotten the gourmet treatment, and shops around American are mixing up some pretty unusual (and still delicious) flavors, but that doesn’t mean that old-school ice cream parlors are any less tasty– some things don’t need to change! In honor of National Ice Cream month, here are our suggestions for America’s tastiest ice cream flavors, and consult the map (see full size map here) to find out how long it’ll take to get to the ice cream shop that tickles your fancy the most. Ready to dig in?

Tom’s Ice Cream Bowl (Zanesville, Ohio) Known for: Tin Roof Sundae. This local gem has been scooping up sundaes since 1948. The old-school atmosphere is authentic, and the ice cream is to die for. The tin roof sundae is a simple scoop of ice cream topped with warm, gooey hot fudge and salty, fresh-roasted peanuts– nothing too fancy, but it’s guaranteed to satisfy any sweet tooth. 

Sweet Action Ice Cream (Denver, Colorado) Known for: milk chocolate. With always-changing, offbeat flavors like blueberry waffle, garam masala, avocado, and maple pale ale, it may seem foolish to order one of the most basic flavors on the menu, but their milk chocolate is legendary. It’s a far cry from the freezer-burned carton of chocolate in the back of your freezer– one bite will make you question everything you ever knew about milk, chocolate, milk chocolate, and ice cream.

Bi-Rite Creamery & Bakeshop (San Francisco, California) Known for: The Trifecta. This sundae is a staff-approved favorite! You get one scoop each of their salted caramel flavor, the brown sugar with ginger swirl, and the malted vanilla, and it’s topped with peanut brittle and chocolate– the perfect complements to the rich, sweet and salty sundae.

Sweet Republic (Scottsdale, Arizona) Known for: Toffee Banofi sundae. The Toffee Banofi sundae is a mind-blowingly amazing twist on the banana split with vanilla bean ice cream topped with fresh bananas, toffee brittle, and whipped cream and drizzled with salted caramel sauce. AND, as if things couldn’t get better, it comes in a waffle cone bowl. If that doesn’t make your mouth water, then you should have your tastebuds checked.

Amy’s Ice Cream (Austin, Texas) Known for: Mexican Vanilla. Once again, basic doesn’t have to mean boring. This rich, sweet ice cream starts with a sweet cream base and has ample amounts of Mexican vanilla added in. Besides, the advantage of ordering a scoop of this vanilla is that it pairs well with just about any other flavor that Amy’s offers: try it with their apple pie, Brandy Alexander, Chai tea, custard donut, or maple bacon flavors (and that’s just naming a few!)

Toscanini’s Ice Cream (Cambridge, Massachusetts) Known for: burnt caramel. Tosci (as the locals call it) has a cozy coffee shop vibe, and while they do brew java, they also make a mean burnt caramel ice cream (among roughly 40 other equally awesome flavors)– and if you’re feeling like eating healthy, they make it as a frozen yogurt too!

Bubbies Homemade Ice Cream & Desserts (Honolulu, Hawaii) Known for: mochi ice cream. This is ice cream like you’ve never experienced before– Bubbies serves the truffle-like mochis, which are essentially little scoops of ice cream wrapped in a shell of Japanese sticky rice, in several flavors, in addition to scoops and slices of ice cream pie. It’s worth it to try at least one mochi; you’ll probably wind up going back for another!

Pumphouse Creamery (Minneapolis, Minnesota) Known for: Peanut butter doggie ice cream. Yep, this place literally makes ice cream for your pooch. They only use peanut butter and milk so it’s totally safe, and your dog will love it on a hot summer day– plus all the proceeds from the doggie ice cream are given to rescue groups! And don’t worry, humans will love their regular ice cream offerings as well. Rum raisin, Door County cherry, and mint chocolate chip are all guaranteed to hit the spot!

Creole Creamery (New Orleans, Louisiana) Known for: Creole cream cheese. You may want to invest in the 6 for $6 sampler because this New Orleans parlor offers a lot of options– but make sure to make one of them the Creole cream cheese. It’s a tangy and sweet confection made with a local type of curddled cream cheese. If that sampler still wasn’t enough to curb your craving for ice cream, then try to tackle the Tchoupitoulas Sundae Challenge– 8 scoops of ice cream, 8 toppings, and a pile of whipped cream, cherries and wafers. Those who finish the challenge alone will be immortalized in their Hall of Fame– but the real prize is how delicious the ice cream is.

Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream (Seattle, Washington) Known for: melted chocolate. Just the image that “melted chocolate” elicits makes this flavor stand out about other chocolates, and the fact that it’s made with organic, fair trade chocolate from local sweet shop Theo’s makes it even better. They clearly value local ingredients, since their wonderful coffee flavor is made with locally-roasted beans from Stumptown. Drool.

Ample Hills Creamery (Brooklyn, New York) Known for: salted crack caramel. This addictively sweet and salty flavor lives up to its name– salted butter caramel ice cream is loaded with bits of crack cookies, which are made chocolate, butter, sugar and saltine crackers. In fact, people get so hooked on the flavor that they keep coming back for more, and it frequently sells out; get there early and order a scoop (or three!) The good news is that they do happen to be sold out of what you want, you really can’t go wrong with any of their flavors.

Moomers Homemade Ice Cream (Traverse City Michigan) Known for: cherries moobilee. It’s like cherries jubilee but a million times better, since it’s been mixed up into sweet, dreamy ice cream. The black cherry base is loaded with sweet black cherries, a chocolate swirl and chunks of chocolate brownies. You can also tour their dairy farm or the ice cream store (which includes an ice cream tasting!!) 

HONORABLE MENTION: Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams (Columbus, Ohio) Known for: Salty caramel. Jeni’s has spread out to bring its deliciousness to several states, but stop into one of the original locations in Ohio for a scoop of homemade goodness. Their salty caramel is a classic that pairs well with their dark chocolate, Buckeye State or my personal favorite, brown butter almond brittle. 

What do you think? Did we miss any? Find your favorite with our interactive map and let us know in the comments below!

America’s Dreamiest Ice Cream | My Bucket List itinerary on Roadtrippers.com!

This will take your breath away.

In a gorgeously shot video (above) for Steinlager Pure beer, freediving star William Trubridge looks like a man with gills as he plunges — without air tanks — into the depths of the sea.

Trubridge appears almost ot…

Ramen noodles are an undeniable staple: they’re the holy grail of cheap and easy dining for college students, and now, they’re taking over the trendy food circle with Ramen burgers.

But are you ready to learn how these peculiar noodles are made?

In …

In Asia, there’s an ongoing irony that deepens as the natural world dwindles to the size of a parking lot. Wild animals, once revered and assigned all kinds of spiritual meaning, are increasingly ending up as the main entrée or as decorations for the rich.

The tiger, for instance, that fierce and terror-inducing king of the jungle, is no longer feared so much as coveted: as a rug, as jewelry made of fangs, as a quixotic dish, or as medicinal products made from its various parts – bones and penis and gall bladder – thought to improve man’s sexual prowess.

But nowhere is the irony as deep as it is in Thailand, where the regal Asian elephant is now facing extinction. According to a recent story reported by the Bangkok Post, three men were arrested this week in Ayutthaya for poisoning an old bull and sawing off its tusks. Arrested, it was also found that they had previously served time for poisoning four tigers in a zoo and took one tiger’s carcass to sell in 2010.

World’s First Elephant Hospital in Thailand

So here’s the irony: The Asian elephant is still a revered cultural icon in Thailand, gracing bas-reliefs of temples and ancient paintings of battle scenes, but it is fast disappearing in reality. The country whose civilization was more or less built on the elephant’s back is now turning its back on the animal.

Indeed, the elephant once served as both builder and war machine: carrying logs and rocks and uprooting trees to build palaces and temples, while fighting countless wars bedecked in the armor of a warrior.

Within Buddhism, Thailand’s state religion and a binding force across much of the region, the elephant remains sacred. According to legend, a white Elephant appeared in the dream of Queen Maya, holding a white lotus flower in its trunk. She later gave birth to the historical Gautama Buddha, Siddhārtha.

Alas, sacred is quickly cast off for cold hard cash. An elephant penis can now fetch as high as $1,000 and a pair of tusks as high as $63,000. Though illegal, poaching has now reached what environmentalists are calling a “crisis point.”

At the beginning of last century there were more than 100,000 wild elephants in existence. One hundred years later the population has dwindled to less than 4,000 domesticated elephants and 3,000 in the wild in Thailand, according to the National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department.

Classified as an endangered species, the Asian elephant is expected to disappear from the wild altogether around 2050, if not sooner.

But while poaching is particularly abhorrent, there are other reasons behind the elephant’s disappearance, chief among them deforestation.

For domesticated elephants in Thailand, deforestation means no more jobs. Logging in Thailand’s forests has long relied on the strength of the powerful pachyderms. An elephant can pull half its weight and carry 600 kilos on its back. In hilly countryside where roads are small and inaccessible to trucks, an elephant is indispensable for the timber business. But logging is all but illegal now in Thailand, and the domesticated elephant, it seems, is so efficient at the timber business that its habitat no longer exists, and it is out of luck.

Elephants guarding a Wat Prakeo in Bangkok

An average Asian elephant weighs 11,000 pounds, and consumes more than 26 gallons of water and 440 pounds of food a day. That’s why their owners consciously curb breeding among the captive beasts, bringing down their number even farther.

Many owners, left with no other choice, have now turned their elephants into urban beggars. It’s not a rare sight to see elephants begging in various urban areas of Thailand.

For the wild elephant conditions are even worse.

Only about 15 percent of the country is still forestland, and those patches are widely scattered. Many wild elephants resort to raiding farms for crops, where they are often shot or poisoned by subsistence farmers.

According to a an Associated Press article in 2012, a new taste for elephant meat has sprung up in mega-modern Thailand as well. The once revered elephant is now being served up alongside the tiger: on a fanciful diner’s plate. Elephant sashimi, apparently, has become the quixotic taste for the nouveaux riches.

Man has conquered everything but himself. The wild is now what we call a reserve, the wilderness nowhere but within. But in a world where even the sacred is devoured, one can’t help but wonder, in another century or so, whether there will anything left but a horde hungry humans, and those that will inherit the earth, cockroaches?

Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and author of the “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,” and “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres.” His latest book is “Birds of Paradise Lost,” a short story collection, was published in 2013 and won a Pen/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2014 and a finalist for the California Book Award and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

It’s a good weekend for gluttony: two Saturday events will allow you to overindulge in either ice cream or burgers. (Or, ya know, both.) From 1 to 4 p.m. tomorrow, head to Dock 5 at Union Markets for the annual DC Scoop festival featuring ice cream, gelato, ice cream sandwiches, popsicles from more than a dozen different […]