Charles Boyd's Blogger: Hernando Ice Cream Adventure Pt. 1: Area 51 Ice Cream

Today is National Ice Cream Day! In honor of this esteemed occasion, here's part one of the great Hernando Ice Cream Adventure.

Last week, I asked readers for their favorite Mid-South places to get ice cream (you can read all about what we came up with here). Several of you recommended two places in Hernando, so I had to check them out for myself.

I grabbed two of my colleagues, Bob and Caroline, and we headed down I-55 to Hernando, Mississippi to double dip into this town's ice cream offerings. Here is a post about our first stop at Area 51. Part Two (about Velvet Cream) is coming along shortly.

Area 51 Ice Cream is a small shop in the Magnolia Square Shopping Center right off of West Commerce Street. If you blink you'll miss it. It's about a 25 minute drive from downtown Memphis, maybe a half hour if you hit some traffic.

Inside it's clean and simple, with about six tables. They serve homemade, small batch ice cream in seasonal flavors that change daily, plus floats, ice cream sandwiches, and other baked goods. They use local produce and ingredients whenever possible, and their flavor selection depends on what they find at the Hernando Farmer's Market that week.

We went with one scoop each of the Cedar Hill blackberry goat cheese and the snickerdoodle, plus The Roswell ice cream float. Ice cream is $2.75 for a single (big) scoop, $4.75 for a double, and $6 for a pint.

The Cedar Hill blackberry goat cheese had bits of frozen blackberry mixed in; it's not overwhelmingly goat-cheesy, but just right. We all decided the snickerdoodle pretty much tasted like Christmas and was mixed with pieces of soft snicker doodle cookies – my favorite.

The Roswell is a creamsicle-like ice cream float with lemon icebox pie flavored ice cream, Orange Crush soda, and a swirl of grenadine. I'm not much of an orange soda girl, but I would never turn this down on a hot summer day (aka every single day). Bob and Caroline both picked The Roswell as their favorite.