Cliff’s Dairy Maid – Huckleberry Buckle

New Jersey Highway Ice Cream

Along a lush green highway in New Jersey is the ice cream stand known as Cliff’s Dairy Maid. This ice cream shop doesn’t feature any indoor seating, and bears resemblance to the traditional ice cream scoop windows in the days of old.

The shop is filled with fun, ice cream loving teenagers, and as they gently lean out the window to get your order, they also kindly let you taste as many samples as you need. This is always a plus for me when making the heavy decision of finding out which flavor I feel like that day. After trying their top 5 flavors or so, I landed on the scoopers personal favorite and recommendation, Huckleberry Buckle.

Huckleberry Buckle Flavor Profile

Sweet cream, a huckleberry jam swirl, and bits of a graham cracker crust all thrown together in a way that is downright delightful. It feels like eating a pie because of the way the jam and graham cracker interact with one another. And the sweetness of the jam acts far more like a pie filling than what you’d expect from just looking at it.

Normally for a flavor like this, you’d almost expect the huckleberry to be infused in the cream base, and then graham cracker bits interwined throughout. But here it’s more like they made a sweet cream ice cream, and chopped up bits of a huckle berry pie and sprinkled it into the ice cream creation.

Regardless of the other ways it could  be made, the fact remains that the way this is made is fantastic.

Now nothing is perfect, so in order to be real with you, it’s time for the flaws. The base isn’t the greatest in terms of  creamy texture consistency, as it feels just as it looks. Freezes slightly hard, and has something of a stern complexion. In fact, the graham cracker pie crust is borderline icy. And as much as I hate to be Boyle from Brooklyn 99, the ‘mouth feel’ leaves you wanting.

You get this strange dichotomy between great taste with a medium texture and consistency. Which begs the question, which is more important, taste? Or mouth feel?

Huckleberry Buckle Conclusion

Decent price to taste to quantity ratio. It’s not the best in terms of consistency, but it’s certainly a fine tasting, pie-like ice cream all the same. I’ll go with taste over mouth feel any day, and I think you should too.

If you want to find this old school ice cream scoop window and try them out for yourself, head to 1475 US-46, Ledgewood, NJ 07852.