The Mister Donut Ice Bar: When donuts become ice cream

As the biggest donut chain in Japan, we often report on Mister Donut adapting their wide range of donuts that are based on other franchises like Calpis or Pokemon.

However, until now rarely had we seen the opposite: an outside food producer base something on Mister Donut.

In honor of the donut shop’s upcoming 50th anniversary, major Japanese food producer Morinaga has concocted the Mister Donut Ice Bar and released it for about 150 yen.

This ice cream bar is based on the long-selling Angel Cream donut which is a donut dusted with powdered sugar and filled with an extra fluffy and sweet whipped cream.

First, let’s break down the structure of the Mister Donut Ice Bar. The ice cream itself looks like plain vanilla, but is actually a sweet whipped cream flavor. This is coated with a chocolate that is mixed with langue-de-chat (“cat’s tongue cookies”) and “donut flavored chips,” which we can only assume are chocolate chips with a donut flavor.

Despite the fancy description we were still expecting more or less a standard ice cream and chocolate snack. But the first bite was a total surprise, the ice cream’s taste was much more like the fluffy filling of a donut.

But what was most amazing was the coating. The addition of langue-de-chat seemed odd at first but made total sense after eating it. The sweet and powdery texture of the cookies felt almost exactly like the powdered sugar on top of the Angel Cream donut.

It was a subtle but brilliant touch that really elevated this ice cream bar to a real work of art. In both taste and texture they carried the experience of eating a donut into the medium of ice cream amazingly well.

Morinaga went above and beyond with this creation and really put a lot of effort into paying homage to Mister Donut with it.

They’re on sale now at convenience stores all over Japan and definitely worth checking out.