I can’t quite pinpoint when it began, my search for the food or drink that best replicates the Creamsicle.

I can’t quite pinpoint why, either — okay, for years I lived with a fridge that didn’t have a separate freezer compartment, so I didn’t tend to keep Creamsicles or any other frozen treats in the house, because cranking the temperature low enough to keep ice cream from semi-melting into a slumpy, squishy, possibly-salmonella-harboring pudding meant that everything else in the fridge’s main compartment froze as well, and using a brick of cheddar to hammer together a piece of furniture from Ikea is kind of funny until it becomes sadly clear that you’re only laughing so you don’t cry. For that reason, a Creamsicle doppelganger may have seemed more practical than an actual Creamsicle. But it’s not as though I’ve tried to reproduce any other ice-cream novelties; I don’t put eighteen sugars in my coffee so it tastes like coffee ice cream, and I don’t put food coloring on a bowlful of pennies to mimic a Bomb Pop. Why the Creamsicle? Could it have anything to do with the fact that one of my cats resembles a Creamsicle, albeit a linty, testy, toasty one more prone than most Creamsicles to the purring and the hurling and the chasing of the tail? I do not know.

I do know that it is hard to clone the Creamsicle experience in other comestible media — harder than you’d think. Vanilla ice cream in a sherbet-esque shell is a simple concept, but the secret is the proportion (and perhaps, to a lesser degree, the faint whiff of porn that attends its phallic shape and its “cream”-containing name — the graphic The Straight Dope selected to accompany a vintage entry on Creamsicles seems to suggest, rather strongly, that it’s a snack best enjoyed by consenting adults, in private, perhaps during a governmental shutdown). The Creamsicle’s primary appeal is the tension between orange and vanilla, a tension which is never resolved, and a Creamsicle-oid product that is either too orangey or too creamy won’t cast the same spell.

Not to elevate the Creamsicle to Tolkien-esque heights of two-flavors-to-rule-them-all runic symbolism over here, but I invested dozens of eleven-dollar drink orders and thousands of calories in the theory that imperfect or unsatisfying pretenders to the Creamsicle throne suffered from an overage of orange and/or a shortage of vanilla, so when I realized 1) that that wasn’t true and 2) why that wasn’t true, the insight did take on a Rosetta Stone-ish quality for me, because when I say “invested,” I mean it. I keep a mental catalog of the Orange Dream Machine “mix” at not only New-York-area Jamba Juices but also at various locations in L.A., and when Wing and Glark and I went out for our TV-pitch-meeting-vaganza five years ago, we had one right near our hotel in Santa Monica but I would ask Glark to stop at one further out because the Santa Monica one used too much orange juice. And it’s contagious. Mr. Stupidhead and I once agreed, without even speaking aloud, that even though we could see the SoHo branch of Jamba from where we’d parked, we would go twenty gridlocked blocks out of the way to the Flatiron Jamba instead because it had a better “ratio,” and what a ridonk pain in the ass that was with the circling the block and the tuck-and-roll to the curb I had to do because of traffic on Fifth Ave., but: worth it, people.

Also worth it: Creme Savers. It doesn’t look like the chewy version is available anymore — which is probably just as well, given my penchant for cramming seventy-three of them into my mouth at once — but the hard-candy original is delicious. And portable!

Alcohol, however, is a problematic addition to the recipe. A number of different Creamsicle-drink recipes exist, but regardless of how the mixology attempts to arrive at the correct fractions — orange and vanilla vodkas, vanilla vodka and OJ, sherbet and cream and spiced rum, white rum and ginger ale and orange zest — it never quite works. Vodka’s sharpness requires too much vanilla to counter; rum can taste like cream soda, which makes the drink too sweet, but adding more orange throws off the percentages; I suspect the only workable solution is to scrape a box of Creamsicles off their sticks and into a blender, pour three or four belts of your drink of choice in after it, and hit “puree.”

Just a few words here on cream soda, which is my other cross-platform flavor obsession. This one is much easier to copy using booze: ginger ale and a half shot of Captain Morgan’s on the rocks, spritz of lime. You have to order it weak to get the palate correct, but they go down so easy that the low alcohol content is for the best. The discovery of that summery thirst-quencher almost makes up for the fact that the cultural Visigoths at Dum-Dum Pops cut the number of cream-soda lollies in the average bag to, like, one. Elbowing the venerable cream soda aside is a menu of diabetes-to-go like bubblegum, chocolate, and the inattentively focus-grouped “blu raspberry,” and you’d better believe I had a whole bulging-forehead-artery tirade here about how strongly I associate that particular candy brand with my childhood, with going to the bank with my dad on Saturday mornings and driving up to the window and getting to put the deposit slips in the pneumatic-tube doodad, which would come back a few minutes later with a receipt and a Dum-Dum for yours truly, and how I got a bag at the drugstore last week and we all broke into it and happiness reigned for a few minutes until Rey wanted to know, and I quote, “what is going on with this cherry-cola bullshit,” at which time we filed a joint objection to the fact that the banana and the chocolate lollipops are separate entities instead of cleverly merged as they are in a Chupa Chup. But the Spangler Candy Company is not completely stupid; it’s thrown the matter open to a vote. You can weigh in on current flavors, new flavors, and future flavors, and one of the potential future flavors? Orange cream! My people! So…could you guys…go vote for that? Please? And also for pumpkin pie, which sounds so unspeakably wrong that I simply must have the opportunity to try it?

Given that the pumpkin and gingerbread lattes at Starbucks, which presented as unnatural and disgusting, ended up owning my ass, I have high hopes, but then, I had high hopes for the Orange Creme Frappuccino, and it let me down. In fact, it’s the OCF that led to my eureka moment re: the proper ratio, because the Starbucks version of the potable Creamsicle is heavy on the vanilla-bean flavoring, with the orange playing the role of vermouth in a very dry martini. It’s just what I thought I wanted from a Creamsicle — lots of Cream, not too much -sicle — but when it came down to it, I missed the orange. I reported this to Mr. S, who didn’t quite believe me when I said it needed more of an orange balance, and I told him, “It’s like when you went to sleep-away camp. I kind of couldn’t wait to get rid of your ass but then when you were gone, the house felt too big or something.” He flipped me the bird, but he knew what I meant.

Share!