Cheesecake is a relatively new presence in my life. That may seem strange, but you have to understand: for most of my life, I was firmly on Team Chocolate. If I had the opportunity to get dessert at a restaurant, I got the chocolate cake. If I was getting ice cream, I got chocolate ice cream with hot fudge, and so on. It’s really only over the past year or so that I had the important revelation that that chocolate is not always the best choice in every scenario. Stuck in a diner recently, eating a bone-dry chocolate layer cake, I realized that the moist cheesecake would have been a much better choice.

Granted, my first forays into ordering cheesecake since then invariably took the form of chocolate cheesecake, but that was all part of the process: Baby steps, baby steps.

All that said, I don’t go out for dinner that often, so I don’t have too many opportunities to explore my new interest in tangy dairy delights. Enter Dairy Queen’s Caramel Fudge Cheesecake Blizzard, an opportunity to enjoy cheesecake in a different format without having to break the bank on a trip to The Cheesecake Factory. Unfortunately, this Blizzard doesn’t sate the cheesecake craving as well as I would have liked.

First, the ice cream has little chocolate bits in it, giving the Blizzard a cookies-and-cream flavor to start with. I really liked this, and had to keep stopping myself from just inhaling the thing in a few gargantuan bites. Once I slowed down enough to breathe, I realized that the Blizzard had two other components: little fudge squares filled with caramel and tiny cheesecake wedges. The fudge squares were prominent, while the cheesecake pieces were rather rare. DQ definitely could have been more generous here.

It was satisfying to get one of the fudge squares in my mouth and dissolve the fudge coating to get to that unctuous, slightly salty caramel inside. Unfortunately, the same was not true of the cheesecake: the wedges (or little balls, as they sometimes were) started out bland and finished with a fairly weak cheesecake aftertaste. I don’t know if the flavor was too mild or if it was just hard to discern the cheesecake flavor in the middle of tons of chocolate-packed ice cream, but it wasn’t robust.

However, the real problem was not with any of the mix-ins but with the blend overall. Try as I might, I couldn’t get this Blizzard to feel like a coherent dessert. There was the fudge-and-caramel component, then there were the little blobs of cheesecake, and the two didn’t seem to have anything to do with one another. The flavors just didn’t seem to marry. Maybe it’s too much to expect the ingredients to all sing harmoniously in a Blizzard, which is all about “Let’s take ice cream and dump random things into it!”, but I couldn’t get past it.

I enjoyed the treat, but Dairy Queen just hasn’t fully conquered cheesecake yet, and if I’m going to take time out from my busy chocolate schedule to get something else, that something else had better be stellar.

Purchased Price: $4.89
Size: Small
Rating: 6 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: 660 calories, 27 grams of fat, 17 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 85 milligrams of cholesterol, 420 milligrams of sodium, 97 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of fiber, 78 grams of sugar, and 15 grams of protein.

Click here to read our previous Dairy Queen Blizzard reviews.